堕落天使 Fallen Angels
堕落天使 Fallen Angels
vendredi 16 mai 2014
Christopher Doyle
REVERSE SHOT: You recently said that when a filmmaker gets you, they get the complete package. You are not only involved in the cinematography but also in the re-writing of the story as you shoot.
Christopher Doyle: For better of worse, they do get the complete package. Although I’ve known Zhang Yimou for a long time, I got involved in Hero because of the producer Billy Kong. Originally I was supposed to shoot Crouching Tiger for him but I couldn’t since I was shooting In the Mood for Love and it kept going on forever. Zhang Yimou and I come from a very different culture, different filmmaking culture too. Lots of people seem to think filmmakers are similar and overlook this. Filmmakers might have similar intentions but the way they work is informed by their culture. The way the industry works in America is because Americans are like that, same in France. I’ve worked in China many times but it implies a different kind of engagement. It’s more formal. In Last Life in the Universe, because of the fact that Thai culture has a much more loose way of approaching things, it was an open collaboration. It’s another structure. This comes from the size of the films, character of people involved. For me, actually, on a very personal level I prefer working on films like Last Life in the Universe. I think you can see that, if you really look at it, you can see the person behind the film and you can see their pleasure. There’s not much else there! It’s a small story. Hero is a much more formal film, it’s a very structured film and the way it was executed is much more structured as well. As a filmmaker you have to try different areas and different places.
RS: Would you compare making Hero to Ashes of Time? Since the latter is also a martial arts film set in the desert, how did your experience in the former help you to work through the challenges of the latter?
Doyle: Yeah, I could not have made Hero without Ashes of Time. The desert really informs you. I’ve made five desert films. The desert has been one of the important learning platforms. It’s a place that has taught me a great deal about filmmaking because you can’t light the desert. You exchange, it’s temperamental, it’s like some relationships. It’s vast and beautiful and engaging. And yet there are a lot of details in the desert. It’s all there. The desert taught me to look more. To be more observant, more patient and to do less. Don’t intrude. Take what you have and make it what you need. The city of Hong Kong also taught me that. In Hong Kong the space is so limited and people move so fast and there’s certain kind of energy and all those things are reflected in Hong Kong-style filmmaking.
RS: What was the process of composing the mise-en-scène in Hero. You have these huge spaces and also this extremely complex choreography. In addition, there’s a wide spectrum of colors that define the narrative structure of the film.
Doyle: Zhang Yimou is a cinematographer; he has a certain visual energy. I’ve done many films where we have avoided red and that was a very conscious choice; up to In the Mood for Love, there’s no red in Wong Kar-wai’s films. For Chinese, red has a very special significance. It means joy. It’s the color for marriages, temples…in many ways it’s the most beautiful color…and it’s a very auspicious color, with many associations in Chinese culture. That’s why we have avoided in the past. In Hero, we wanted all these cultural associations. The point of departure is color. You have a Rashomon kind of story. And then color. The easy one was red, red as passion. We were not sure about the others and that was the journey, specifically based on locations. Sixty percent of the film is shot outdoors, and, for example, you cannot change the color of the lake. We knew the lake and the forest with the yellow leaves were very important. So we searched for the locations and from them we reworked the script, instead of imposing a color to a particular location. I think this also comes across in Last Life in the Universe. The house is very much a character in the film. When we found that house I insisted on it, because it had such a presence that I felt the film would be three times better. In Hero, we were choosing colors depending on the locations. The most difficult one was the flashback, in the Emperor’s palace, when they almost assassinate the Emperor. We basically ran out of colors and we were not going to use pink! Green was the choice, it was the only color we felt comfortable with. I knew Fuji has an interesting green so we went along with it.
[Vittorio] Storaro claims green is the color of knowledge. It’s not as simple as Storaro and other people claim. It’s not a theoretical exercise; it’s a practical one. To say the stuff that Storaro says to the kids is really misinformation. It’s dangerous, it confuses people, and makes them think that film is a theoretical exercise. As a cinematographer you’re dealing every minute with weather, people’s emotions, technical problems. The style comes from the contingencies of the film and that’s very important to realize for younger filmmmakers.
RS: Like the black-and-white shots in Fallen Angels. They were the result of a problem…
Doyle: We fucked up with the film stock. It was old. We couldn’t re-shoot…so of course it was foggy in color. We said: “maybe this can represent something so let’s pick some other pieces,” and that’s what we did. Because of a mistake, a certain structure came out of the film and you can write a PhD about it if you want. What happened was that we gave it a system, so we made the most important parts of each scene in black-and-white. But that was a solution to the problem, not an original concept. We just appropriated the mistake and made it work. It’s a more intuitive, open, or, maybe, Asian way of working.
RS: Fallen Angels was completely groundbreaking. It’s a film in which the closer you get to the image the less you see. This is obviously very different from Hero, in which everything is supposed to be pristine and harmonic…
Doyle: Hong Kong and the desert are two very different spaces. Both films are totally informed by the location where they happen. In addition, Wong Kar-wai and Zhang Yimou are two very different filmmakers in their approach to the image and storytelling. Hero, above all, is a celebration of martial arts chivalry.
RS: Is it true that Tony Leung’s apartment in Chungking Express is your actual apartment?
Doyle: I still live there… it’s actually a Japanese tourist stop. Especially after the movie came out in 1995. They would take photographs of my house all day. It’s right in the middle of Hong Kong. As a result of this, everybody knows where I live. Just ask in the street. Downstairs, there are lots of bars. They all know me because I’m always in the bar.
RS: I’d like to talk about Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake, on which you worked. Would you agree that contemporary cinema is, to a great extent, defined by an appropriation of other cinematic traditions, genres, visual styles? Wong Kar-wai once said that current filmmakers no longer make original works of art, they recycle what has been done before.
Doyle: No. I think the only time I see films is on planes. I take a lot of planes, so I do manage to see lots of films. But to me film is not the basis of my life, my creative energy comes from other things, usually music, or people, or the way in which I live. The people who decide to work with me know that. Therefore, what you mention is their job. Gus Van Sant knew that. Psycho is not a film but a conceptual artwork. I don’t think you need to see the film. It’s just a concept, a very expensive one. It cost $20 million to make and $40 million to promote. If you went to Hollywood, and tell them let’s do some performance art, they wouldn’t give you 60 million. They did in this case. My role in Psycho was not to know, not to remember the original film.
Same with martial arts films. Because of where I live (Hong Kong), the people I’ve worked with, I know the working details. In fact, I know better than Zhang Yimou the actual physical procedure to make a martial arts film. However, it’s much more his job to try to make his own film. That was a difficult thing for me to work with because Zhang didn’t know the procedure to shoot a martial arts film. Now, the West is taking over, The Matrix and all that…they are borrowing this style but they’re structuring scenes much more systematically…storyboards, all kinds of preparation.
However, Hero was shot like an old-style Hong-Kong martial arts film. To be honest, you don’t know what you are going get while shooting. The martial artists don’t know either, but they make it up as they go along and they continuously try new things. It’s choreography. Which means the communication is quite difficult and the logistics are quite complicated as well. Basically, what you need to do is to try to direct the film in a certain direction and then take what you need. You’re dealing with very special people. Martial artists come from a very proud tradition and you know, they can beat the shit out of you…
RS: So in Hero, Zhang, the choreographer, and the martial artists planned a scene and then you adapted to what they were doing…
Doyle: Zhang Yimou tried but it’s much less planned than other forms of cinema. The wind is too strong so someone cannot fly, or, on the lake, it’s very difficult to get people in the air, you need wires…it’s a very slow procedure. Sometimes, you get two or three shots in a day. It takes a lot of concentration and collaboration. Even if you have a plan, then you have actors that are tired, or we are in a very high altitude, most of film is at 3000 thousand feet, physically it’s quite difficult to do. So it’s not a Tarantino kind of exercise, it’s much more organic. Zhang’s main reason to make a martial arts film is political. If you make a genre piece, you have much more scope than if you make a film about people taking ecstasy in Beijing. It’s much easier to get things across. There’s still censorship, and script supervision in China.
RS: The ultimate message of Hero seems to defend a kind of internal imperialism. It has been widely criticized as racist. What’s at stake in this film?
Doyle: There’s a really strong reaction for people who know Chinese history, especially in some areas in China and Taiwan. It’s a little bit revisionist for some people in terms of the white-washing of this historical character. There are many films about this period, like Emperor and the Assassin, so the jury is still out. There’s a debate about what this emperor really did. He was the first emperor of China; he did unite the country. How did he do it? He was an extremely ruthless man. Zhang’s intentions and personal relationship with the politics of his country are much more complex than that. I don’t know and I don’t think I have the right to talk about it. I don’t choose films based on the script but based on the person. If it was too disgusting, I’d stay away from it.
RS: After seeing To Live and Red Sorghum, which are very critical films, it’s surprising that Hero…
Christopher Doyle: You’re saying he sold out, right? I can’t judge, but many people say that…I can’t judge. By the way, Zhang is a very rich man…I have very rich friends in China and I’m not really sure…I’ve seen the way society is evolving now…it’s going in a direction I don’t personally like…but look what they come from…look at the shit they’ve been through…At a personal level, I can reject certain aspects the way China is changing. But I don’t think I have any right to criticize them because they’ve gone through a hell I don’t truly know, I don’t have any right, or precision, to be critical. Zhang has to evolve the way he wants, that’s his choice.
RS: In Hero, calligraphy is represented as an artistic process, having an organic relationship with the individual psyche and also his abilities as martial artist. In the end, this same calligraphy is used in order to offer the unity of China, “Our Land,” as an ideal and to endorse the Emperor’s slaughtering practice.
Doyle: In Chinese it’s slightly different. The ideogram Tony Leung writes, on the one hand, means “Under Heaven”; it means there is a god. It also means “Under the Emperor.” Of course, it still has this implication that this is our place, also that it’s a gift, given to us by Heaven, it’s a unified place but it’s a gift. It’s not quite as heavy as “our land.” You have to take into account that China means “Central Country.” Chinese people have a very centralist worldview.
RS: In the trailer of Hero, the film is introduced as “Quentin Tarantino presents…”
Doyle: Oh really?
RS: According to what I’ve heard, Miramax was hesitant to release the film and Tarantino volunteered to make it happen. Though his intentions might be good, Hero is being sold to audiences as a Tarantino product with Jet Li created by the producer of Crouching Tiger.
Doyle: To me it implies that they want to trick everybody into seeing a martial arts film and make all the money in the first weekend and then they don’t give a shit. Hero is not a martial arts film as Crouching Tiger is. If you go to the film, expecting back-to-back action, you’re going be disappointed. Crouching Tiger, because of who Ang Lee is, has a more American background. This doesn’t have a user-friendly American narrative structure. It’s much more literary. I think it’s the wrong angle to promote the film.
RS: How would you compare the work of Zhang and Wong Kar-wai to that of Tarantino, who is a great appropriator, combining different film styles and traditions?
Doyle: He’s like that in person too…He never stops talking. Quentin is quite fun in a bar…. I think that, in a positive way, he references enough stuff so people go to see the other films. Tarantino promotes a certain vision of cinema that is different. However, I do think his intentions are good. Personally and most of the people I’ve worked with, we come from a different place. Whatever you’re appropriating, you’re absorbing it, it’s filtered through your unconscious and it comes back as something else. Wong and I reference multiple things, but we’re not repeating them. The opposite, we usually avoid repetition. It’s impossible not to repeat other things. Nothing is original, but it can be very personal and the angle, the intention can be very personal.
Trouvé ici.
Christopher Doyle: For better of worse, they do get the complete package. Although I’ve known Zhang Yimou for a long time, I got involved in Hero because of the producer Billy Kong. Originally I was supposed to shoot Crouching Tiger for him but I couldn’t since I was shooting In the Mood for Love and it kept going on forever. Zhang Yimou and I come from a very different culture, different filmmaking culture too. Lots of people seem to think filmmakers are similar and overlook this. Filmmakers might have similar intentions but the way they work is informed by their culture. The way the industry works in America is because Americans are like that, same in France. I’ve worked in China many times but it implies a different kind of engagement. It’s more formal. In Last Life in the Universe, because of the fact that Thai culture has a much more loose way of approaching things, it was an open collaboration. It’s another structure. This comes from the size of the films, character of people involved. For me, actually, on a very personal level I prefer working on films like Last Life in the Universe. I think you can see that, if you really look at it, you can see the person behind the film and you can see their pleasure. There’s not much else there! It’s a small story. Hero is a much more formal film, it’s a very structured film and the way it was executed is much more structured as well. As a filmmaker you have to try different areas and different places.
RS: Would you compare making Hero to Ashes of Time? Since the latter is also a martial arts film set in the desert, how did your experience in the former help you to work through the challenges of the latter?
Doyle: Yeah, I could not have made Hero without Ashes of Time. The desert really informs you. I’ve made five desert films. The desert has been one of the important learning platforms. It’s a place that has taught me a great deal about filmmaking because you can’t light the desert. You exchange, it’s temperamental, it’s like some relationships. It’s vast and beautiful and engaging. And yet there are a lot of details in the desert. It’s all there. The desert taught me to look more. To be more observant, more patient and to do less. Don’t intrude. Take what you have and make it what you need. The city of Hong Kong also taught me that. In Hong Kong the space is so limited and people move so fast and there’s certain kind of energy and all those things are reflected in Hong Kong-style filmmaking.
RS: What was the process of composing the mise-en-scène in Hero. You have these huge spaces and also this extremely complex choreography. In addition, there’s a wide spectrum of colors that define the narrative structure of the film.
Doyle: Zhang Yimou is a cinematographer; he has a certain visual energy. I’ve done many films where we have avoided red and that was a very conscious choice; up to In the Mood for Love, there’s no red in Wong Kar-wai’s films. For Chinese, red has a very special significance. It means joy. It’s the color for marriages, temples…in many ways it’s the most beautiful color…and it’s a very auspicious color, with many associations in Chinese culture. That’s why we have avoided in the past. In Hero, we wanted all these cultural associations. The point of departure is color. You have a Rashomon kind of story. And then color. The easy one was red, red as passion. We were not sure about the others and that was the journey, specifically based on locations. Sixty percent of the film is shot outdoors, and, for example, you cannot change the color of the lake. We knew the lake and the forest with the yellow leaves were very important. So we searched for the locations and from them we reworked the script, instead of imposing a color to a particular location. I think this also comes across in Last Life in the Universe. The house is very much a character in the film. When we found that house I insisted on it, because it had such a presence that I felt the film would be three times better. In Hero, we were choosing colors depending on the locations. The most difficult one was the flashback, in the Emperor’s palace, when they almost assassinate the Emperor. We basically ran out of colors and we were not going to use pink! Green was the choice, it was the only color we felt comfortable with. I knew Fuji has an interesting green so we went along with it.
[Vittorio] Storaro claims green is the color of knowledge. It’s not as simple as Storaro and other people claim. It’s not a theoretical exercise; it’s a practical one. To say the stuff that Storaro says to the kids is really misinformation. It’s dangerous, it confuses people, and makes them think that film is a theoretical exercise. As a cinematographer you’re dealing every minute with weather, people’s emotions, technical problems. The style comes from the contingencies of the film and that’s very important to realize for younger filmmmakers.
RS: Like the black-and-white shots in Fallen Angels. They were the result of a problem…
Doyle: We fucked up with the film stock. It was old. We couldn’t re-shoot…so of course it was foggy in color. We said: “maybe this can represent something so let’s pick some other pieces,” and that’s what we did. Because of a mistake, a certain structure came out of the film and you can write a PhD about it if you want. What happened was that we gave it a system, so we made the most important parts of each scene in black-and-white. But that was a solution to the problem, not an original concept. We just appropriated the mistake and made it work. It’s a more intuitive, open, or, maybe, Asian way of working.
RS: Fallen Angels was completely groundbreaking. It’s a film in which the closer you get to the image the less you see. This is obviously very different from Hero, in which everything is supposed to be pristine and harmonic…
Doyle: Hong Kong and the desert are two very different spaces. Both films are totally informed by the location where they happen. In addition, Wong Kar-wai and Zhang Yimou are two very different filmmakers in their approach to the image and storytelling. Hero, above all, is a celebration of martial arts chivalry.
RS: Is it true that Tony Leung’s apartment in Chungking Express is your actual apartment?
Doyle: I still live there… it’s actually a Japanese tourist stop. Especially after the movie came out in 1995. They would take photographs of my house all day. It’s right in the middle of Hong Kong. As a result of this, everybody knows where I live. Just ask in the street. Downstairs, there are lots of bars. They all know me because I’m always in the bar.
RS: I’d like to talk about Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake, on which you worked. Would you agree that contemporary cinema is, to a great extent, defined by an appropriation of other cinematic traditions, genres, visual styles? Wong Kar-wai once said that current filmmakers no longer make original works of art, they recycle what has been done before.
Doyle: No. I think the only time I see films is on planes. I take a lot of planes, so I do manage to see lots of films. But to me film is not the basis of my life, my creative energy comes from other things, usually music, or people, or the way in which I live. The people who decide to work with me know that. Therefore, what you mention is their job. Gus Van Sant knew that. Psycho is not a film but a conceptual artwork. I don’t think you need to see the film. It’s just a concept, a very expensive one. It cost $20 million to make and $40 million to promote. If you went to Hollywood, and tell them let’s do some performance art, they wouldn’t give you 60 million. They did in this case. My role in Psycho was not to know, not to remember the original film.
Same with martial arts films. Because of where I live (Hong Kong), the people I’ve worked with, I know the working details. In fact, I know better than Zhang Yimou the actual physical procedure to make a martial arts film. However, it’s much more his job to try to make his own film. That was a difficult thing for me to work with because Zhang didn’t know the procedure to shoot a martial arts film. Now, the West is taking over, The Matrix and all that…they are borrowing this style but they’re structuring scenes much more systematically…storyboards, all kinds of preparation.
However, Hero was shot like an old-style Hong-Kong martial arts film. To be honest, you don’t know what you are going get while shooting. The martial artists don’t know either, but they make it up as they go along and they continuously try new things. It’s choreography. Which means the communication is quite difficult and the logistics are quite complicated as well. Basically, what you need to do is to try to direct the film in a certain direction and then take what you need. You’re dealing with very special people. Martial artists come from a very proud tradition and you know, they can beat the shit out of you…
RS: So in Hero, Zhang, the choreographer, and the martial artists planned a scene and then you adapted to what they were doing…
Doyle: Zhang Yimou tried but it’s much less planned than other forms of cinema. The wind is too strong so someone cannot fly, or, on the lake, it’s very difficult to get people in the air, you need wires…it’s a very slow procedure. Sometimes, you get two or three shots in a day. It takes a lot of concentration and collaboration. Even if you have a plan, then you have actors that are tired, or we are in a very high altitude, most of film is at 3000 thousand feet, physically it’s quite difficult to do. So it’s not a Tarantino kind of exercise, it’s much more organic. Zhang’s main reason to make a martial arts film is political. If you make a genre piece, you have much more scope than if you make a film about people taking ecstasy in Beijing. It’s much easier to get things across. There’s still censorship, and script supervision in China.
RS: The ultimate message of Hero seems to defend a kind of internal imperialism. It has been widely criticized as racist. What’s at stake in this film?
Doyle: There’s a really strong reaction for people who know Chinese history, especially in some areas in China and Taiwan. It’s a little bit revisionist for some people in terms of the white-washing of this historical character. There are many films about this period, like Emperor and the Assassin, so the jury is still out. There’s a debate about what this emperor really did. He was the first emperor of China; he did unite the country. How did he do it? He was an extremely ruthless man. Zhang’s intentions and personal relationship with the politics of his country are much more complex than that. I don’t know and I don’t think I have the right to talk about it. I don’t choose films based on the script but based on the person. If it was too disgusting, I’d stay away from it.
RS: After seeing To Live and Red Sorghum, which are very critical films, it’s surprising that Hero…
Christopher Doyle: You’re saying he sold out, right? I can’t judge, but many people say that…I can’t judge. By the way, Zhang is a very rich man…I have very rich friends in China and I’m not really sure…I’ve seen the way society is evolving now…it’s going in a direction I don’t personally like…but look what they come from…look at the shit they’ve been through…At a personal level, I can reject certain aspects the way China is changing. But I don’t think I have any right to criticize them because they’ve gone through a hell I don’t truly know, I don’t have any right, or precision, to be critical. Zhang has to evolve the way he wants, that’s his choice.
RS: In Hero, calligraphy is represented as an artistic process, having an organic relationship with the individual psyche and also his abilities as martial artist. In the end, this same calligraphy is used in order to offer the unity of China, “Our Land,” as an ideal and to endorse the Emperor’s slaughtering practice.
Doyle: In Chinese it’s slightly different. The ideogram Tony Leung writes, on the one hand, means “Under Heaven”; it means there is a god. It also means “Under the Emperor.” Of course, it still has this implication that this is our place, also that it’s a gift, given to us by Heaven, it’s a unified place but it’s a gift. It’s not quite as heavy as “our land.” You have to take into account that China means “Central Country.” Chinese people have a very centralist worldview.
RS: In the trailer of Hero, the film is introduced as “Quentin Tarantino presents…”
Doyle: Oh really?
RS: According to what I’ve heard, Miramax was hesitant to release the film and Tarantino volunteered to make it happen. Though his intentions might be good, Hero is being sold to audiences as a Tarantino product with Jet Li created by the producer of Crouching Tiger.
Doyle: To me it implies that they want to trick everybody into seeing a martial arts film and make all the money in the first weekend and then they don’t give a shit. Hero is not a martial arts film as Crouching Tiger is. If you go to the film, expecting back-to-back action, you’re going be disappointed. Crouching Tiger, because of who Ang Lee is, has a more American background. This doesn’t have a user-friendly American narrative structure. It’s much more literary. I think it’s the wrong angle to promote the film.
RS: How would you compare the work of Zhang and Wong Kar-wai to that of Tarantino, who is a great appropriator, combining different film styles and traditions?
Doyle: He’s like that in person too…He never stops talking. Quentin is quite fun in a bar…. I think that, in a positive way, he references enough stuff so people go to see the other films. Tarantino promotes a certain vision of cinema that is different. However, I do think his intentions are good. Personally and most of the people I’ve worked with, we come from a different place. Whatever you’re appropriating, you’re absorbing it, it’s filtered through your unconscious and it comes back as something else. Wong and I reference multiple things, but we’re not repeating them. The opposite, we usually avoid repetition. It’s impossible not to repeat other things. Nothing is original, but it can be very personal and the angle, the intention can be very personal.
Trouvé ici.
Christopher Doyle 王家卫
DU KE FENG (CHRISTOPHER DOYLE): What does redux literally mean? And where does the word come from?
WONG KAR WAI: The first time the word redux appeared in a film title was when Francis Ford Coppola used it for his film Apocalypse Now Redux [2001]. For Coppola the word means "reassessed" and "reconsidered." But in our case it has nothing to do with reconsideration. It's more about rescuing a film that means a lot to us. Our film could have been called Saving Ashes of Time. The laboratory where we stored all our negatives went bankrupt overnight following the Asian economic crisis in 1997. So on short notice we had to retrieve all the materials in the middle of the night before the debtor-receiver took over the laboratory the next morning. While checking the materials we salvaged, we noticed that some of the original negatives and sound tapes had deteriorated into pieces. We decided to rescue the film from a life of existing only on DVD or bootlegged Chinatown VHS. At first, we thought it was only a simple restoration. Not until a few years later did we realize that it was actually an odyssey. We spent the first few years searching for missing materials. It took us from Hong Kong to overseas distributors and to various Chinatowns across North America. By the time we collected all the materials, we realized that a 100-percent restoration of the original version was out of the question, so we trimmed out the parts that were beyond repair and replaced them with other options. From there we embarked on another five-year journey from restoration to redux. To revisit a dream that is more than 15 years old is complicated. Technology helps much of the time but not always. The hardest part is to restrain myself from looking at it with the experiences and changes that I went through in the years since; I just wanted to make sure [the film] was what it was supposed to be back then, when we were making it.
DKF: I couldn't have done Rabbit-Proof Fence [2002, with Phillip Noyce] if I hadn't learned from Ashes to listen to the rhythms of a place. I feel the organic evolution of the storytelling has as much to do with the space in which it takes place as it does the idiosyncrasies of our working style.
WKW: Unlike today, shooting in the remote desert in the western part of China was an adventure. Arranging the trips for our eight lead actors back and forth between Hong Kong and our location was in itself a nightmare.
DKF: Those were the days: Shooting one actor's side of a conversation, then shooting the other side two months later, when the actor he or she was supposed to be talking to finally arrived.
WKW: Do you still remember what happened on the last day of shooting?
DKF: Thankfully not.
WKW: I have kept in my file a picture of your naked butt. To me, it's like a metaphor of the way we worked then.
DKF: I could say I wanted to be naked for the whole shoot, or I could claim the heat was getting to me. But mostly I was apologizing (in my way) for not getting all the shots we had in our hearts and our heads. Or perhaps I just wanted to be as true (or do I mean "blue") as the desert sky.
The happenstances of our shared and separate ways have meant that WKW and I are not able to sit this interview out (i.e., meet to talk). Deadlines have always been less relevant than the one this magazine gave us, so this e-mail is our recourse. As in our approach to our films, it is as much the talking as the gesture that is the content. -DKF
WKW: It is not very often that a director is offered the chance to make a big-budget martial arts epic. I jumped at this opportunity with all my knowledge about this genre, fearing that there wouldn't be a second chance. To separate ourselves from the previous adaptations, we simply put the original novel aside and went ahead to invent our own vision. It's more than a standard martial arts film; it's Shakespeare meets Sergio Leone in Chinese.
DKF: Action is a bitch to shoot, as is football or any endeavor whose rules and conventions are unfamiliar (to me).
WKW: For me, shooting an action scene is no different from shooting a love scene. What really matters is what happens before the penetration and not after.
DKF: We tried to give each episode its particular look. This effort seems to me more evident in Ashes of Time Redux. Is it the music? Or the reworking of the structure? Or have perhaps other martial arts-based films educated our eye?
WKW: You mean Kung Fu Panda put us on the map?
DKF: Well, they say the Minister of Film (or whatever he or she is called) apologized to the Chinese people for not having made Kung Fu Panda themselves. Maybe in the States we should change the name [of our film] to Ashes of Panda.
Monday afternoon at a café in the Toronto airport, watching Roger Federer beat Andy Murray at the U.S. Open. -WKW
WKW: Dear DKF, normally you dance to my music, and now I have to match your steps. Not easy, but let's figure out the dance floor first: How long ago did we finish Ashes of Time? Fifteen years ago, or four months ago, or at some point in between?
DKF: Fifteen years ago? [The film] certainly is taking its time finding its time, and yet it feels immediate enough to be the new film it has become. Even now there are moments and images I can't stop rethinking and reworking. Perhaps that is what one does in the films that follow.
WKW: Another picture that I have kept in my file is of Leslie, taken by you, with a note. May I quote what you wrote then? "Leslie hates me when I say my habitual ‘anytime' if I'm not completely ready to shoot. He thinks I'm more up and down, emotionally, than he is. But I'm not so sure. We've made four films together now, and we intend to make many more. I've come to know the fine details of his moods and needs and how much he gets into his role." The night Leslie died we were shooting Eros [2004] with Gong Li and Chang Chen. When the news reached our office, we thought it was an April Fools' Day joke. Soon we realized it was true and we had lost him.
DKF: We have not lost Leslie, but I didn't know that I could miss him so till I missed him so. We aren't immortal in or through our art-we live in the ways of those we touch to love. Leslie is where he needs to be.
Trouvé ici.
WONG KAR WAI: The first time the word redux appeared in a film title was when Francis Ford Coppola used it for his film Apocalypse Now Redux [2001]. For Coppola the word means "reassessed" and "reconsidered." But in our case it has nothing to do with reconsideration. It's more about rescuing a film that means a lot to us. Our film could have been called Saving Ashes of Time. The laboratory where we stored all our negatives went bankrupt overnight following the Asian economic crisis in 1997. So on short notice we had to retrieve all the materials in the middle of the night before the debtor-receiver took over the laboratory the next morning. While checking the materials we salvaged, we noticed that some of the original negatives and sound tapes had deteriorated into pieces. We decided to rescue the film from a life of existing only on DVD or bootlegged Chinatown VHS. At first, we thought it was only a simple restoration. Not until a few years later did we realize that it was actually an odyssey. We spent the first few years searching for missing materials. It took us from Hong Kong to overseas distributors and to various Chinatowns across North America. By the time we collected all the materials, we realized that a 100-percent restoration of the original version was out of the question, so we trimmed out the parts that were beyond repair and replaced them with other options. From there we embarked on another five-year journey from restoration to redux. To revisit a dream that is more than 15 years old is complicated. Technology helps much of the time but not always. The hardest part is to restrain myself from looking at it with the experiences and changes that I went through in the years since; I just wanted to make sure [the film] was what it was supposed to be back then, when we were making it.
DKF: I couldn't have done Rabbit-Proof Fence [2002, with Phillip Noyce] if I hadn't learned from Ashes to listen to the rhythms of a place. I feel the organic evolution of the storytelling has as much to do with the space in which it takes place as it does the idiosyncrasies of our working style.
WKW: Unlike today, shooting in the remote desert in the western part of China was an adventure. Arranging the trips for our eight lead actors back and forth between Hong Kong and our location was in itself a nightmare.
DKF: Those were the days: Shooting one actor's side of a conversation, then shooting the other side two months later, when the actor he or she was supposed to be talking to finally arrived.
WKW: Do you still remember what happened on the last day of shooting?
DKF: Thankfully not.
WKW: I have kept in my file a picture of your naked butt. To me, it's like a metaphor of the way we worked then.
DKF: I could say I wanted to be naked for the whole shoot, or I could claim the heat was getting to me. But mostly I was apologizing (in my way) for not getting all the shots we had in our hearts and our heads. Or perhaps I just wanted to be as true (or do I mean "blue") as the desert sky.
The happenstances of our shared and separate ways have meant that WKW and I are not able to sit this interview out (i.e., meet to talk). Deadlines have always been less relevant than the one this magazine gave us, so this e-mail is our recourse. As in our approach to our films, it is as much the talking as the gesture that is the content. -DKF
WKW: It is not very often that a director is offered the chance to make a big-budget martial arts epic. I jumped at this opportunity with all my knowledge about this genre, fearing that there wouldn't be a second chance. To separate ourselves from the previous adaptations, we simply put the original novel aside and went ahead to invent our own vision. It's more than a standard martial arts film; it's Shakespeare meets Sergio Leone in Chinese.
DKF: Action is a bitch to shoot, as is football or any endeavor whose rules and conventions are unfamiliar (to me).
WKW: For me, shooting an action scene is no different from shooting a love scene. What really matters is what happens before the penetration and not after.
DKF: We tried to give each episode its particular look. This effort seems to me more evident in Ashes of Time Redux. Is it the music? Or the reworking of the structure? Or have perhaps other martial arts-based films educated our eye?
WKW: You mean Kung Fu Panda put us on the map?
DKF: Well, they say the Minister of Film (or whatever he or she is called) apologized to the Chinese people for not having made Kung Fu Panda themselves. Maybe in the States we should change the name [of our film] to Ashes of Panda.
Monday afternoon at a café in the Toronto airport, watching Roger Federer beat Andy Murray at the U.S. Open. -WKW
WKW: Dear DKF, normally you dance to my music, and now I have to match your steps. Not easy, but let's figure out the dance floor first: How long ago did we finish Ashes of Time? Fifteen years ago, or four months ago, or at some point in between?
DKF: Fifteen years ago? [The film] certainly is taking its time finding its time, and yet it feels immediate enough to be the new film it has become. Even now there are moments and images I can't stop rethinking and reworking. Perhaps that is what one does in the films that follow.
WKW: Another picture that I have kept in my file is of Leslie, taken by you, with a note. May I quote what you wrote then? "Leslie hates me when I say my habitual ‘anytime' if I'm not completely ready to shoot. He thinks I'm more up and down, emotionally, than he is. But I'm not so sure. We've made four films together now, and we intend to make many more. I've come to know the fine details of his moods and needs and how much he gets into his role." The night Leslie died we were shooting Eros [2004] with Gong Li and Chang Chen. When the news reached our office, we thought it was an April Fools' Day joke. Soon we realized it was true and we had lost him.
DKF: We have not lost Leslie, but I didn't know that I could miss him so till I missed him so. We aren't immortal in or through our art-we live in the ways of those we touch to love. Leslie is where he needs to be.
Trouvé ici.
lundi 5 mai 2014
一代宗师 The Grandmaster
新京报：这部影片的评价两极化，你都有关注吗？大家的各种看法和你最想要表达的东西是一样的吗？
王家卫：对于外界的评价当然有耳闻。电影是个载体，每个人看完都有自己的感受，让观众自己讲比较好。有些观众评价影片的结构，有些关心感情的起伏，也有人认为这部电影多精致、再现了民国的氛围，但我觉得，这部电影最重要的还是讲述民国武林，武林就不能没有功夫。这部电影最大的挑战是怎么去把功夫表现出来。
一开始我和八爷（袁和平）有过沟通，我希望《一代宗师》从画面和动作上能看出每个门派。每个门派都有自己的手法和哲学，叶问和宫二，如果不是从小到大练习功夫培养的思维方法，他们的人格就不完整。
新京报：但普通观众不一定能看出门派的差别，能帮忙普及一下吗？
王家卫：譬如说，分辨咏春拳和八卦掌，八卦掌是走圆形的，是走偏门抢攻的，它的方位是前后左右上下，所以宫二会说“咏春拳只有眼前路，八卦掌要兼顾到身后身”,因为咏春拳基本上是直线的，攻和防是在一起，只有眼前路。咏春拳以前的电影里有很多表现，但拳理是什么，我想通过电影给大家看。梁朝伟这次展现的咏春八脚（撑、踹、蹬、凿、扫、钉、摊、挑），大家在以前的电影里都没见过
八卦掌在电影上也没有具体地讲过，比如六十四手就是八卦掌的基本功能，宫家的六十四手则是带有形意路的八卦掌，因为形意拳和八卦掌两门是通的，形意比较刚烈，补充了八卦掌的阴柔，两个一起练就会刚柔并重。我们从小听过的郭云深老师（注：清末武术家）的半步崩拳，我拜访过很多形意门的老师，包括这部电影的编剧徐皓峰也是形意门的，他对这门派很有研究。我们就把形意的半步崩拳都放在电影里了。
八极拳最有名的是李书文，我们都希望很具体地表现出来，你不掌握这些特点，没法展示这些拳的拳理和它的风格。八极拳有个说法叫“硬开门”，不等你开门，他们就会硬闯进来。
新京报：你觉得门派的风格会影响到人物的命运？
王家卫：对，你选择哪个拳种，它的拳理和训练过程慢慢和你的人融合在一起。叶问是坚持做人只有眼前路、没有身后身，因为咏春的拳理就是回头无岸。我为什么把叶问跟宫二对立，他们也是一阳一阴，代表了两种人生态度，一种人眼睛永远望着前面，宫二是永远看后面，到最后她宁愿留下，因为她一生都在回头。所以为什么梁朝伟说她缺一个转身，她没往前看。那老猿挂印的那个回首望月，就是说很多时候回头是一种回想，一种反思，但有时候也是怀旧。
新京报：你曾在发布会上说还可以剪辑3个月，上映版本不是你最完美的版本吧？
王家卫：所谓3个月、6个月，对于这部电影你可以继续慢慢弄，每个阶段都有不同的看法，今天这个版本是今天这个看法，明天做出来会有不一样，哪个好我不敢说。有时候是你迷在这件事里面、有自己特别的感受，观众不一定会认同这一点。我不认为现在上映的是半成品，这部电影我花了很长时间，绝对不会匆忙剪出来嘛。有观众感觉我很赶，所以就觉得声音或画面还没做到完美，这个意见我也有注意。
新京报：有香港媒体报道说你希望4小时完整版能上映，真的是这样吗？
王家卫：我想这应该是多年以后的事情，就像《东邪西毒》终极版那样（笑）。4小时版本准确的意思是：我们拍的素材是可以剪辑成4个小时，会让每个角色的故事都完整，但这样的安排不会是一个最佳的结果。
我原来的想法就像民国的章回体小说，小时候看平江不肖生的武侠小说，每个章回都是讲一个人物，或许这个人物下个章回就不见了，再下去也不会出现。人生也有点像这样。我曾想让《一代宗师》就用10个章节讲10个人物，但我心想观众肯定不会习惯。我们没有这个能力要求大家牺牲一天里的4个小时看这个电影，尤其是当你对这个电影还不太了解时。我们往后有机会会做4个小时的电影，愿意看的人过来看一下。
新京报：张震扮演的一线天、赵本山扮演的丁连山在4小时版本里都会有完整地讲述？
王家卫：是的。但这是以后的事情，如果遇到合适的机会可以把他们的故事发展开来。就像丁连山和宫保田，他俩是第一代中华武士会的精英，当年和辛亥革命都有关联，故事都很精彩。
这些人身在武林，其实都裹挟在政治里
新京报：宗师们的人生变故和大时代关系很大，这么看来，一线天、丁连山等都和军政界有瓜葛？
王家卫：宫老爷子开场来到佛山是代表中华武士会，这个组织就是同盟会的嘛。这些人身在武林，其实都裹挟在政治里面。我们后来在电影里没有选择讲述背景，宫老爷子为何是1936年来到广东，那时候刚好是两广事变（广西的新桂系和广东的陈济棠粤系借抗日之名反抗蒋介石）所以南北分家，宫老爷子在这个时候说“南拳北传”是非常不适宜的，所以他会面对困难，但他还是坚持自己的想法：“拳分南北，国也分南北吗？”
一线天基本就算是特工，民国是个暗杀的时代，所谓面子和里子，面子上是做光彩的事情，里子却是搞暗杀。一线天的原型来自两个人，一个是八极拳的大师，叫李书文，他出手不留情，但人非常懒，他说有用的一招就够。另一个是台湾的大师，叫刘云樵，他在民国时代是一个特工，也为抗日做了很多事情，之后到了台湾也是发扬八极拳。
新京报：电影中你对主角的军政背景还是做了虚化处理，为什么？
王家卫：《一代宗师》确实有政治关联在里面，但所谓的江湖、武林，是相对于朝廷的，它和政治有关联，但永远要保持着距离。
新京报：宗师南下，这和你家当年从上海南迁到香港很像，拍这部片是不是也有个人情怀在里面？
王家卫：唯一的个人情怀是：我原来的构想是从家旁边那条路的武馆讲起。为什么一线天要开理发厅，因为小时候我家对面有一个上海理发厅，那时经常去理发，也没觉得有多奇怪，后来做资料搜集时才发现，原来形意门最早来到香港就在楼上开宗立派，楼下的理发厅里很多都是他们的徒弟。最早我想拍香港街道上的武馆，但发现他们都来自内地。于是现在的故事就是从他们的根说起，最后他们流落到了香港。
最有意思、最值得去探讨和纪念的是那个时代的精神。从清朝到共和、北伐、抗日，在这个过程里，很多人在面对困难时，还保持着自己的情操。那个年代的人对信、义、家庭、国家都有自己的坚持。应该珍惜的是民国的精神，在民族最困难时还有这一批人坚持可贵的信念。宫二为何在最后说，面对这个大时代，民国就是这个大时代。为何有些武师选择留在香港，不是因为他们没落了，而是要保持他们的尊严。
1 宫二的戏份超过叶问引发了较多争议。可能多数观众都是来看“一代宗师叶问”的，为何做出这样的安排？
王家卫：这个戏份的比例我没仔细算，但人物戏多戏少很重要。宫二是我杜撰的人物。她非常传奇，民国这样的奇女子很多，比如施剑翘。（注：施剑翘是奉系第二军军长施从滨之女，为报杀父之仇枪杀孙传芳。）宫二对观众来说是比较新鲜的，叶问呢，之前电影也拍了很多，大家对他比较熟悉。以前观众关注的是叶问的打，但我希望观众看到他的成长。他的成长不是从7岁开始，而是从40岁开始的。最有趣的是，叶问40岁之前什么都有，但40岁之后开始变得一无所有，唯一留在他身上的是武术赋予的精神。
2 叶问妻子张永成这个角色呢，和宫二完全不一样？
王家卫：我跟宋慧乔说，你不是普通的大家闺秀，这个女人是一种大智慧。在这个戏里面，她第一个出场是在屏门后面。一般来说我们看电影，从男性的角度欣赏女人，好像女人是男人的宠物，这个故事相反，这个女人是把男人当成是她的宠物。为什么梁朝伟到最后没有再娶，因为有这个女人。
3 很多资料说，叶问1950年去香港后绝口不提他在内地的事直到去世。这是否就是电影中所指“只走眼前路，不管身后身”？
王家卫：那个年代的人啊，都不太喜欢讲往事，就像戏里面章子怡对未婚夫说的，“没消息就是消息”。叶问到香港之后，从来不喜欢拍照。我在想，一个人为什么不喜欢拍照，可能是照片总是会让他想起某一些岁月，他不愿意再去想，所以不想再拍。
4 片中叶问说因为战乱他没有去东北，但有观众发现片中有个叶问在宫家门口徘徊的镜头，他到底有没有去东北？
王家卫：这个应该交给观众去琢磨，可以说他去了，也可以说这只是叶问的梦想。
5 张震扮演的一线天剧情很少，有观众觉得删除也可以，但你为何还保留了几段戏呢？
王家卫：张震和梁朝伟平行。两个都是开宗立派，但叶问有了光环，成为一代宗师，另一个就成了一代理发师。也就是戏里说的人活一世，有的活成了“面子”，有的活成了“里子”，能耐是其次的，都是时势使然。张震、梁朝伟的两场重要打戏都是在雨中，这不是观众说的重复，而是要强调他们都是一个平台出来的，面对这么多人，最后都能站着，但最后的境遇是不一样的。但这个武林啊，不能全都是拿着光环的人，很多人默默在做很多事情，他们没有光环，他们默默地把祖宗传下来的东西还给众生。
6 你以往的电影中，人物都有着家长里短的对话，但《一代宗师》中人物说话格言警句变得很多，这是为什么？
王家卫：《2046》《花样年华》里面的人物都是我们身边的人，不可能在生活中讲一些特别玄的话。《一代宗师》讲述的是武林人物，那些深刻的话都不是我们编出来的，而是去访问武林的老师傅时他们随口讲出来的。他们是武者，讲话有一些特别的气场。如果你要拍一些武术宗师，缺少这样的台词，观众也不会认为这是真的宗师。
Trouvé ici.
王家卫：对于外界的评价当然有耳闻。电影是个载体，每个人看完都有自己的感受，让观众自己讲比较好。有些观众评价影片的结构，有些关心感情的起伏，也有人认为这部电影多精致、再现了民国的氛围，但我觉得，这部电影最重要的还是讲述民国武林，武林就不能没有功夫。这部电影最大的挑战是怎么去把功夫表现出来。
一开始我和八爷（袁和平）有过沟通，我希望《一代宗师》从画面和动作上能看出每个门派。每个门派都有自己的手法和哲学，叶问和宫二，如果不是从小到大练习功夫培养的思维方法，他们的人格就不完整。
新京报：但普通观众不一定能看出门派的差别，能帮忙普及一下吗？
王家卫：譬如说，分辨咏春拳和八卦掌，八卦掌是走圆形的，是走偏门抢攻的，它的方位是前后左右上下，所以宫二会说“咏春拳只有眼前路，八卦掌要兼顾到身后身”,因为咏春拳基本上是直线的，攻和防是在一起，只有眼前路。咏春拳以前的电影里有很多表现，但拳理是什么，我想通过电影给大家看。梁朝伟这次展现的咏春八脚（撑、踹、蹬、凿、扫、钉、摊、挑），大家在以前的电影里都没见过
八卦掌在电影上也没有具体地讲过，比如六十四手就是八卦掌的基本功能，宫家的六十四手则是带有形意路的八卦掌，因为形意拳和八卦掌两门是通的，形意比较刚烈，补充了八卦掌的阴柔，两个一起练就会刚柔并重。我们从小听过的郭云深老师（注：清末武术家）的半步崩拳，我拜访过很多形意门的老师，包括这部电影的编剧徐皓峰也是形意门的，他对这门派很有研究。我们就把形意的半步崩拳都放在电影里了。
八极拳最有名的是李书文，我们都希望很具体地表现出来，你不掌握这些特点，没法展示这些拳的拳理和它的风格。八极拳有个说法叫“硬开门”，不等你开门，他们就会硬闯进来。
新京报：你觉得门派的风格会影响到人物的命运？
王家卫：对，你选择哪个拳种，它的拳理和训练过程慢慢和你的人融合在一起。叶问是坚持做人只有眼前路、没有身后身，因为咏春的拳理就是回头无岸。我为什么把叶问跟宫二对立，他们也是一阳一阴，代表了两种人生态度，一种人眼睛永远望着前面，宫二是永远看后面，到最后她宁愿留下，因为她一生都在回头。所以为什么梁朝伟说她缺一个转身，她没往前看。那老猿挂印的那个回首望月，就是说很多时候回头是一种回想，一种反思，但有时候也是怀旧。
新京报：你曾在发布会上说还可以剪辑3个月，上映版本不是你最完美的版本吧？
王家卫：所谓3个月、6个月，对于这部电影你可以继续慢慢弄，每个阶段都有不同的看法，今天这个版本是今天这个看法，明天做出来会有不一样，哪个好我不敢说。有时候是你迷在这件事里面、有自己特别的感受，观众不一定会认同这一点。我不认为现在上映的是半成品，这部电影我花了很长时间，绝对不会匆忙剪出来嘛。有观众感觉我很赶，所以就觉得声音或画面还没做到完美，这个意见我也有注意。
新京报：有香港媒体报道说你希望4小时完整版能上映，真的是这样吗？
王家卫：我想这应该是多年以后的事情，就像《东邪西毒》终极版那样（笑）。4小时版本准确的意思是：我们拍的素材是可以剪辑成4个小时，会让每个角色的故事都完整，但这样的安排不会是一个最佳的结果。
我原来的想法就像民国的章回体小说，小时候看平江不肖生的武侠小说，每个章回都是讲一个人物，或许这个人物下个章回就不见了，再下去也不会出现。人生也有点像这样。我曾想让《一代宗师》就用10个章节讲10个人物，但我心想观众肯定不会习惯。我们没有这个能力要求大家牺牲一天里的4个小时看这个电影，尤其是当你对这个电影还不太了解时。我们往后有机会会做4个小时的电影，愿意看的人过来看一下。
新京报：张震扮演的一线天、赵本山扮演的丁连山在4小时版本里都会有完整地讲述？
王家卫：是的。但这是以后的事情，如果遇到合适的机会可以把他们的故事发展开来。就像丁连山和宫保田，他俩是第一代中华武士会的精英，当年和辛亥革命都有关联，故事都很精彩。
这些人身在武林，其实都裹挟在政治里
新京报：宗师们的人生变故和大时代关系很大，这么看来，一线天、丁连山等都和军政界有瓜葛？
王家卫：宫老爷子开场来到佛山是代表中华武士会，这个组织就是同盟会的嘛。这些人身在武林，其实都裹挟在政治里面。我们后来在电影里没有选择讲述背景，宫老爷子为何是1936年来到广东，那时候刚好是两广事变（广西的新桂系和广东的陈济棠粤系借抗日之名反抗蒋介石）所以南北分家，宫老爷子在这个时候说“南拳北传”是非常不适宜的，所以他会面对困难，但他还是坚持自己的想法：“拳分南北，国也分南北吗？”
一线天基本就算是特工，民国是个暗杀的时代，所谓面子和里子，面子上是做光彩的事情，里子却是搞暗杀。一线天的原型来自两个人，一个是八极拳的大师，叫李书文，他出手不留情，但人非常懒，他说有用的一招就够。另一个是台湾的大师，叫刘云樵，他在民国时代是一个特工，也为抗日做了很多事情，之后到了台湾也是发扬八极拳。
新京报：电影中你对主角的军政背景还是做了虚化处理，为什么？
王家卫：《一代宗师》确实有政治关联在里面，但所谓的江湖、武林，是相对于朝廷的，它和政治有关联，但永远要保持着距离。
新京报：宗师南下，这和你家当年从上海南迁到香港很像，拍这部片是不是也有个人情怀在里面？
王家卫：唯一的个人情怀是：我原来的构想是从家旁边那条路的武馆讲起。为什么一线天要开理发厅，因为小时候我家对面有一个上海理发厅，那时经常去理发，也没觉得有多奇怪，后来做资料搜集时才发现，原来形意门最早来到香港就在楼上开宗立派，楼下的理发厅里很多都是他们的徒弟。最早我想拍香港街道上的武馆，但发现他们都来自内地。于是现在的故事就是从他们的根说起，最后他们流落到了香港。
最有意思、最值得去探讨和纪念的是那个时代的精神。从清朝到共和、北伐、抗日，在这个过程里，很多人在面对困难时，还保持着自己的情操。那个年代的人对信、义、家庭、国家都有自己的坚持。应该珍惜的是民国的精神，在民族最困难时还有这一批人坚持可贵的信念。宫二为何在最后说，面对这个大时代，民国就是这个大时代。为何有些武师选择留在香港，不是因为他们没落了，而是要保持他们的尊严。
1 宫二的戏份超过叶问引发了较多争议。可能多数观众都是来看“一代宗师叶问”的，为何做出这样的安排？
王家卫：这个戏份的比例我没仔细算，但人物戏多戏少很重要。宫二是我杜撰的人物。她非常传奇，民国这样的奇女子很多，比如施剑翘。（注：施剑翘是奉系第二军军长施从滨之女，为报杀父之仇枪杀孙传芳。）宫二对观众来说是比较新鲜的，叶问呢，之前电影也拍了很多，大家对他比较熟悉。以前观众关注的是叶问的打，但我希望观众看到他的成长。他的成长不是从7岁开始，而是从40岁开始的。最有趣的是，叶问40岁之前什么都有，但40岁之后开始变得一无所有，唯一留在他身上的是武术赋予的精神。
2 叶问妻子张永成这个角色呢，和宫二完全不一样？
王家卫：我跟宋慧乔说，你不是普通的大家闺秀，这个女人是一种大智慧。在这个戏里面，她第一个出场是在屏门后面。一般来说我们看电影，从男性的角度欣赏女人，好像女人是男人的宠物，这个故事相反，这个女人是把男人当成是她的宠物。为什么梁朝伟到最后没有再娶，因为有这个女人。
3 很多资料说，叶问1950年去香港后绝口不提他在内地的事直到去世。这是否就是电影中所指“只走眼前路，不管身后身”？
王家卫：那个年代的人啊，都不太喜欢讲往事，就像戏里面章子怡对未婚夫说的，“没消息就是消息”。叶问到香港之后，从来不喜欢拍照。我在想，一个人为什么不喜欢拍照，可能是照片总是会让他想起某一些岁月，他不愿意再去想，所以不想再拍。
4 片中叶问说因为战乱他没有去东北，但有观众发现片中有个叶问在宫家门口徘徊的镜头，他到底有没有去东北？
王家卫：这个应该交给观众去琢磨，可以说他去了，也可以说这只是叶问的梦想。
5 张震扮演的一线天剧情很少，有观众觉得删除也可以，但你为何还保留了几段戏呢？
王家卫：张震和梁朝伟平行。两个都是开宗立派，但叶问有了光环，成为一代宗师，另一个就成了一代理发师。也就是戏里说的人活一世，有的活成了“面子”，有的活成了“里子”，能耐是其次的，都是时势使然。张震、梁朝伟的两场重要打戏都是在雨中，这不是观众说的重复，而是要强调他们都是一个平台出来的，面对这么多人，最后都能站着，但最后的境遇是不一样的。但这个武林啊，不能全都是拿着光环的人，很多人默默在做很多事情，他们没有光环，他们默默地把祖宗传下来的东西还给众生。
6 你以往的电影中，人物都有着家长里短的对话，但《一代宗师》中人物说话格言警句变得很多，这是为什么？
王家卫：《2046》《花样年华》里面的人物都是我们身边的人，不可能在生活中讲一些特别玄的话。《一代宗师》讲述的是武林人物，那些深刻的话都不是我们编出来的，而是去访问武林的老师傅时他们随口讲出来的。他们是武者，讲话有一些特别的气场。如果你要拍一些武术宗师，缺少这样的台词，观众也不会认为这是真的宗师。
Trouvé ici.
dimanche 4 mai 2014
一代宗师 The Grandmaster
Il y a plus d’une dizaine d’années que le projet The Grandmaster traînait dans vos tiroirs…
En 1996, je flânais dans une gare de Buenos Aires où nous tournions Happy Together, et j’ai aperçu le visage de Bruce Lee en couverture d’un magazine. J’avais toujours adoré ses films, mais j’ai été stupéfait par la persistance de son aura, si loin de chez nous, plus de vingt ans après sa mort. J’ai alors compris ce qui le rendait si hors du commun. Son physique, son attitude en rupture avec les autres acteurs de films de kung-fu avant lui qui étaient avant tout des combattants machos, plutôt plus âgés, alors que lui était séduisant, plein d’assurance, charismatique, et parlait anglais. Ensuite, il fut le premier à avoir apporté par sa présence une forme de modernité à cette figure du héros martial chinois. Eduqué en Occident, sa grande intelligence a été de ne pas suivre les règles, mais de les analyser pour mieux s’inventer les siennes propres. Il était capable mieux que quiconque de communiquer l’idée la plus complexe des arts martiaux de la manière la plus simple. Moi qui avais jusqu’alors surtout filmé des femmes, je me suis dit que je voulais faire un film sur la beauté d’un tel homme chinois.
Sauf que The Grandmaster n’évoque pas Bruce Lee. Comment le projet a-t-il ainsi dérivé ?
Bruce Lee se référait sans cesse dans ses écrits et ses propos à Ip Man, son maître en arts martiaux, et je m’y suis intéressé. Sa vie est un reflet passionnant d’un pan de l’histoire chinoise au XXe siècle. Il est né sous la monarchie, a traversé le temps de la république, vécu la guerre sino-japonaise et a fini dans la colonie britannique qu’était Hongkong. C’est aussi ce que je voulais raconter, à travers lui. Surtout, deux ans plus tard, alors que je recherchais l’angle personnel à adopter, je suis tombé sur un documentaire et j’ai été frappé par une séquence extrêmement émouvante. On y voyait Ip Man vieillard, s’enregistrant trois jours avant sa mort en train d’effectuer une démonstration de wing chun. A la fin, il marque un temps d’arrêt, et la caméra est trop loin pour que l’on sache s’il a oublié le mouvement suivant ou s’il est simplement trop faible pour poursuivre. C’était bouleversant. Le document en question est légendaire : de son vivant, nombreux sont ceux, y compris Bruce Lee, qui lui ont offert beaucoup d’argent pour qu’il leur enseigne cette démonstration, et il a toujours refusé, préférant prodiguer son savoir à ses étudiants plutôt qu’à une seule personne dans un échange marchand. Et c’est là que j’ai su quel film je voulais faire : une histoire d’héritage, de générosité et de noblesse, qui ait à voir avec l’énergie de cet homme à porter cette flamme.
Entre-temps, vous avez réalisé trois autres films. Pourquoi a-t-il fallu si longtemps à celui-ci pour se faire ?
Le projet nécessitait une préparation et des moyens de production importants. Il a fallu attendre que la croissance du marché du cinéma chinois ait suffisamment progressé pour qu’il devienne possible de réaliser un tel film à cette échelle économique. Ensuite, ce n’était pas évident d’exiger de stars comme Zhang Ziyi et Tony Leung qu’elles consacrent un an à s’entraîner, puis deux ans au tournage. Il fallait attendre le bon moment.
Une fois de plus vous avez commencé à tourner sans scénario arrêté ?
En effet. On a démarré très simplement, avec la biographie d’Ip Man pour trame. C’est une histoire d’héritage, de verticalité et d’horizontalité, d’un grand maître du Sud et d’un autre du Nord qui se trouve être une femme (un personnage fictif, car à cette époque les femmes n’avaient pas de place dans les arts martiaux). Je ne sais pas pour les autres cinéastes, mais pour moi ces quelques informations que je vous donne sont suffisantes pour constituer le commencement d’un film. L’idée originelle était de tourner d’abord la scène d’ouverture avec Tony Leung, mais il se trouve qu’il s’est cassé le bras dès le premier jour. En attendant qu’il se rétablisse, on a dû déplacer la production au Nord et commencer par s’attacher au personnage féminin. Cela a apporté une autre dimension à cette part du film, plus longue et détaillée.
Quels autres accidents ont pu ainsi façonner le cheminement du film ?
Ma manière de faire a peu à voir avec l’idée de cheminement, justement, parce que je tiens à garder toujours le récit aussi flexible que possible. Une des raisons pour lesquelles je ne veux pas partir d’un soi-disant «scénario complet» est que je ne veux pas d’un destin tout tracé, je ne veux pas que les choses se fassent scène par scène, selon une trame écrite alors que je ne peux rien anticiper des nombreux accidents qui vont survenir, bons ou mauvais. Je prends les choses comme elles viennent. Nous savions où le film devait s’achever : quand Tony Leung s’installe à Hongkong, où il crée son école et finira ses jours. Comment y arriver ? Il fallait laisser la route se tracer d’elle-même. Ma méthode est très organique.
Vos collaborateurs disent que le sens de vos scènes naît de leur tournage même…
Tout est affaire de hasard, rien n’est destiné à l’avance. Comme l’accident de Tony qui nous a poussés à aller au Nord en pleine saison froide, travailler jour et nuit sans dormir sur les décors afin de pouvoir tourner au plus vite, puis filmer des combats sur des semaines, par -20°C. Plus tard, il a fallu y retourner dans la chaleur étouffante de l’été pour compléter ces scènes hivernales, et les acteurs ont ainsi dû tourner en manteaux de fourrure alors qu’il faisait plus de 40°C. Malgré tout, ce tournage fut une expérience très détendue. Le «lâcher prise» est une des valeurs des arts martiaux, et il fallait s’y accorder pour faire un tel film. C’est ce que j’en ai appris : oublier la technique, partir sans structure, se laisser porter par le cours des scènes.
Il paraît que The Grandmaster restera comme le dernier film tourné en pellicule Fuji. Et, justement, il n’y est question que de nostalgie, de mondes et d’époques perdues…
Il y avait une certaine dimension métaphorique, presque poétique, à ce que nous tournions ainsi en pellicule, ce qui est devenu rare : on nous en envoyait des stocks régulièrement, jusqu’à ce que l’on reçoive un message de Fuji, un mois avant que nous arrêtions de tourner, nous annonçant que leur dernier envoi de pellicule serait bel et bien le dernier, que la production s’arrêtait, que c’était la fin. Je l’ai pris comme un indice, un signe que le film devait s’arrêter là. J’ai gardé la dernière boîte, en souvenir. Et cela résonnait au fond avec cette idée que l’esprit, la dimension philosophique des arts martiaux se perd au fil des temps, et qu’un jour cela ne devient rien de plus qu’une page d’histoire.
Tous vos films, même ceux qui se déroulent dans une époque passée, n’ont cessé de porter un regard plus ou moins déguisé sur la vibration du Hongkong présent. In the Mood for Love parlait de la colonisation, 2046 d’un certain état de paralysie. Ici, il est question de l’invasion japonaise, faut-il y voir un écho au Hongkong redevenu chinois ?
Ce n’est pas ça, il ne s’agit pas d’invasion : on n’envahit pas sa propre famille. Les Hongkongais ont peur de la Chine, mais je crois qu’ils ont tort. En revanche, il est question dans le film de la rivalité entre les grands maîtres du Nord et du Sud, et leurs philosophies respectives. Et j’y vois une métaphore des pôles Nord et Sud de la Chine moderne. Au premier plan, il est question de l’histoire chinoise, mais quand vous regardez le film vous comprenez comment s’est construit le Hongkong contemporain, par l’afflux d’immigrants au gré des secousses historiques sur le continent, qui ont considérablement influencé la population locale. Ce sont les guerres et les changements politiques en Chine qui ont amené le sang neuf, la finance et d’innombrables ressources à Hongkong. A travers la métaphore de l’école fondée par Ip Man, le film montre aussi une culture sur laquelle Hongkong a pris racine et qui s’est perdue. Ce que je veux dire avec ce film, c’est : «Voilà d’où nous venons, voilà qui nous étions autrefois.»
Vos derniers films tournent de plus en plus autour de l’époque de votre enfance, quand vous arrivez à Hongkong avec votre mère à l’âge de 5 ans alors que votre père reste coincé à Shanghai par la Révolution culturelle…
Je ne dirais pas que je tourne autour, mais que c’est peut-être plutôt quelque chose qui me manque aujourd’hui. Une certaine élégance, un certain caractère de cette époque, qui manquent à notre temps. J’ai beaucoup filmé le présent, et en attendant qu’il m’inspire à nouveau je préfère revisiter cette expérience et la partager avec le public.
Entretien avec Julien Gester, trouvé ici.
En 1996, je flânais dans une gare de Buenos Aires où nous tournions Happy Together, et j’ai aperçu le visage de Bruce Lee en couverture d’un magazine. J’avais toujours adoré ses films, mais j’ai été stupéfait par la persistance de son aura, si loin de chez nous, plus de vingt ans après sa mort. J’ai alors compris ce qui le rendait si hors du commun. Son physique, son attitude en rupture avec les autres acteurs de films de kung-fu avant lui qui étaient avant tout des combattants machos, plutôt plus âgés, alors que lui était séduisant, plein d’assurance, charismatique, et parlait anglais. Ensuite, il fut le premier à avoir apporté par sa présence une forme de modernité à cette figure du héros martial chinois. Eduqué en Occident, sa grande intelligence a été de ne pas suivre les règles, mais de les analyser pour mieux s’inventer les siennes propres. Il était capable mieux que quiconque de communiquer l’idée la plus complexe des arts martiaux de la manière la plus simple. Moi qui avais jusqu’alors surtout filmé des femmes, je me suis dit que je voulais faire un film sur la beauté d’un tel homme chinois.
Sauf que The Grandmaster n’évoque pas Bruce Lee. Comment le projet a-t-il ainsi dérivé ?
Bruce Lee se référait sans cesse dans ses écrits et ses propos à Ip Man, son maître en arts martiaux, et je m’y suis intéressé. Sa vie est un reflet passionnant d’un pan de l’histoire chinoise au XXe siècle. Il est né sous la monarchie, a traversé le temps de la république, vécu la guerre sino-japonaise et a fini dans la colonie britannique qu’était Hongkong. C’est aussi ce que je voulais raconter, à travers lui. Surtout, deux ans plus tard, alors que je recherchais l’angle personnel à adopter, je suis tombé sur un documentaire et j’ai été frappé par une séquence extrêmement émouvante. On y voyait Ip Man vieillard, s’enregistrant trois jours avant sa mort en train d’effectuer une démonstration de wing chun. A la fin, il marque un temps d’arrêt, et la caméra est trop loin pour que l’on sache s’il a oublié le mouvement suivant ou s’il est simplement trop faible pour poursuivre. C’était bouleversant. Le document en question est légendaire : de son vivant, nombreux sont ceux, y compris Bruce Lee, qui lui ont offert beaucoup d’argent pour qu’il leur enseigne cette démonstration, et il a toujours refusé, préférant prodiguer son savoir à ses étudiants plutôt qu’à une seule personne dans un échange marchand. Et c’est là que j’ai su quel film je voulais faire : une histoire d’héritage, de générosité et de noblesse, qui ait à voir avec l’énergie de cet homme à porter cette flamme.
Entre-temps, vous avez réalisé trois autres films. Pourquoi a-t-il fallu si longtemps à celui-ci pour se faire ?
Le projet nécessitait une préparation et des moyens de production importants. Il a fallu attendre que la croissance du marché du cinéma chinois ait suffisamment progressé pour qu’il devienne possible de réaliser un tel film à cette échelle économique. Ensuite, ce n’était pas évident d’exiger de stars comme Zhang Ziyi et Tony Leung qu’elles consacrent un an à s’entraîner, puis deux ans au tournage. Il fallait attendre le bon moment.
Une fois de plus vous avez commencé à tourner sans scénario arrêté ?
En effet. On a démarré très simplement, avec la biographie d’Ip Man pour trame. C’est une histoire d’héritage, de verticalité et d’horizontalité, d’un grand maître du Sud et d’un autre du Nord qui se trouve être une femme (un personnage fictif, car à cette époque les femmes n’avaient pas de place dans les arts martiaux). Je ne sais pas pour les autres cinéastes, mais pour moi ces quelques informations que je vous donne sont suffisantes pour constituer le commencement d’un film. L’idée originelle était de tourner d’abord la scène d’ouverture avec Tony Leung, mais il se trouve qu’il s’est cassé le bras dès le premier jour. En attendant qu’il se rétablisse, on a dû déplacer la production au Nord et commencer par s’attacher au personnage féminin. Cela a apporté une autre dimension à cette part du film, plus longue et détaillée.
Quels autres accidents ont pu ainsi façonner le cheminement du film ?
Ma manière de faire a peu à voir avec l’idée de cheminement, justement, parce que je tiens à garder toujours le récit aussi flexible que possible. Une des raisons pour lesquelles je ne veux pas partir d’un soi-disant «scénario complet» est que je ne veux pas d’un destin tout tracé, je ne veux pas que les choses se fassent scène par scène, selon une trame écrite alors que je ne peux rien anticiper des nombreux accidents qui vont survenir, bons ou mauvais. Je prends les choses comme elles viennent. Nous savions où le film devait s’achever : quand Tony Leung s’installe à Hongkong, où il crée son école et finira ses jours. Comment y arriver ? Il fallait laisser la route se tracer d’elle-même. Ma méthode est très organique.
Vos collaborateurs disent que le sens de vos scènes naît de leur tournage même…
Tout est affaire de hasard, rien n’est destiné à l’avance. Comme l’accident de Tony qui nous a poussés à aller au Nord en pleine saison froide, travailler jour et nuit sans dormir sur les décors afin de pouvoir tourner au plus vite, puis filmer des combats sur des semaines, par -20°C. Plus tard, il a fallu y retourner dans la chaleur étouffante de l’été pour compléter ces scènes hivernales, et les acteurs ont ainsi dû tourner en manteaux de fourrure alors qu’il faisait plus de 40°C. Malgré tout, ce tournage fut une expérience très détendue. Le «lâcher prise» est une des valeurs des arts martiaux, et il fallait s’y accorder pour faire un tel film. C’est ce que j’en ai appris : oublier la technique, partir sans structure, se laisser porter par le cours des scènes.
Il paraît que The Grandmaster restera comme le dernier film tourné en pellicule Fuji. Et, justement, il n’y est question que de nostalgie, de mondes et d’époques perdues…
Il y avait une certaine dimension métaphorique, presque poétique, à ce que nous tournions ainsi en pellicule, ce qui est devenu rare : on nous en envoyait des stocks régulièrement, jusqu’à ce que l’on reçoive un message de Fuji, un mois avant que nous arrêtions de tourner, nous annonçant que leur dernier envoi de pellicule serait bel et bien le dernier, que la production s’arrêtait, que c’était la fin. Je l’ai pris comme un indice, un signe que le film devait s’arrêter là. J’ai gardé la dernière boîte, en souvenir. Et cela résonnait au fond avec cette idée que l’esprit, la dimension philosophique des arts martiaux se perd au fil des temps, et qu’un jour cela ne devient rien de plus qu’une page d’histoire.
Tous vos films, même ceux qui se déroulent dans une époque passée, n’ont cessé de porter un regard plus ou moins déguisé sur la vibration du Hongkong présent. In the Mood for Love parlait de la colonisation, 2046 d’un certain état de paralysie. Ici, il est question de l’invasion japonaise, faut-il y voir un écho au Hongkong redevenu chinois ?
Ce n’est pas ça, il ne s’agit pas d’invasion : on n’envahit pas sa propre famille. Les Hongkongais ont peur de la Chine, mais je crois qu’ils ont tort. En revanche, il est question dans le film de la rivalité entre les grands maîtres du Nord et du Sud, et leurs philosophies respectives. Et j’y vois une métaphore des pôles Nord et Sud de la Chine moderne. Au premier plan, il est question de l’histoire chinoise, mais quand vous regardez le film vous comprenez comment s’est construit le Hongkong contemporain, par l’afflux d’immigrants au gré des secousses historiques sur le continent, qui ont considérablement influencé la population locale. Ce sont les guerres et les changements politiques en Chine qui ont amené le sang neuf, la finance et d’innombrables ressources à Hongkong. A travers la métaphore de l’école fondée par Ip Man, le film montre aussi une culture sur laquelle Hongkong a pris racine et qui s’est perdue. Ce que je veux dire avec ce film, c’est : «Voilà d’où nous venons, voilà qui nous étions autrefois.»
Vos derniers films tournent de plus en plus autour de l’époque de votre enfance, quand vous arrivez à Hongkong avec votre mère à l’âge de 5 ans alors que votre père reste coincé à Shanghai par la Révolution culturelle…
Je ne dirais pas que je tourne autour, mais que c’est peut-être plutôt quelque chose qui me manque aujourd’hui. Une certaine élégance, un certain caractère de cette époque, qui manquent à notre temps. J’ai beaucoup filmé le présent, et en attendant qu’il m’inspire à nouveau je préfère revisiter cette expérience et la partager avec le public.
Entretien avec Julien Gester, trouvé ici.
一代宗师 The Grandmaster
记者：电影从四个小时调整到130分钟，四小时的版本比现在多了什么？
王家卫：剪到四小时版本的时候，我已经觉得不能再剪了，但片方要我剪到一个适合观众的长度，所以我不得不又剪掉了很多喜欢的东西，最简单的就是你们看过的父女偷拳长大，那部分是我很喜欢的，张震也有一部分戏是我很喜欢的，宫二的戏的背景也是我很喜欢的，但是如果我喜欢的戏都留下来，那投资方就要崩溃了。
记者：为什么要请赵本山和小沈阳，感觉他们俩的风格和您电影的风格有点格格不入。
王家卫：一个树林里面不可能只有一种树啊，你要是要做一个民国群像的话，他里面要有叶问这样的人，有一线天这样的人，有宫二这样的女子，也有丁连山（赵本山饰演的角色）这样的人，不然就会单调了。你想你现在去吃饭，如果每个菜都是羊腿，那你是不是受不了？
记者：不是出于对内地票房的考虑么？
王家卫：你们现在的观念呐，现在都还是停留在香港导演北上掘金呐这种观念里，要不然就是一天到晚说我们要跟好莱坞去拼啊什么的，其实就是一个“饼”的问题，电影其实是没有分东西，没有分地域的，电影人就是那么纯粹。你说李安拍《少年派》，会硬要把孟加拉虎弄成东北虎，因为要北上掘金吗？肯定不是。你们现在的思维啊，有时候太功利了，在拍电影的时候，不会有这样的想法。
记者：章子怡演的宫二这个人物，感觉她性格上有很大的局限性，是因为您对那个时代女性的性格就是这样理解的么？
王家卫：小朋友你听着！在民国啊，有很多这样的女子的。施剑翘，她的父亲也是一个军阀，当年被孙传芳枪毙了，这个女人开始要给她的父亲去报仇，但开始她没有勇气，结果呢有个男人跟她说，我替你父亲报仇你就嫁给我，然后她就嫁给了他，结果这个男人也是蒙她的，等到她生了孩子之后，她知道这个男人是不可能做这件事的，于是她就决定自己去做这件事。因为那个时候孙传芳已经退下来了，是一个居士，在一个佛堂里面念经，这个女人就在他念经的时候把他打死了，全国那个时候都为她呼吁，说这个女人是为了报父仇，不应该判死刑，这是一个很伟大的故事。就是一个女人她托付了很多人，但最后发现唯一能去做这件事的人，只有她自己，所以她把生下来的孩子交给夫家，自己一个人去复仇了，这个就是民国的女人，她们刚烈的时候可以达到这个极致。
记者：那您以后还有什么计划再跟梁朝伟合作么？
王家卫：为什么不呢？我那么爱他，他也那么爱我。
Trouvé ici.
王家卫：剪到四小时版本的时候，我已经觉得不能再剪了，但片方要我剪到一个适合观众的长度，所以我不得不又剪掉了很多喜欢的东西，最简单的就是你们看过的父女偷拳长大，那部分是我很喜欢的，张震也有一部分戏是我很喜欢的，宫二的戏的背景也是我很喜欢的，但是如果我喜欢的戏都留下来，那投资方就要崩溃了。
记者：为什么要请赵本山和小沈阳，感觉他们俩的风格和您电影的风格有点格格不入。
王家卫：一个树林里面不可能只有一种树啊，你要是要做一个民国群像的话，他里面要有叶问这样的人，有一线天这样的人，有宫二这样的女子，也有丁连山（赵本山饰演的角色）这样的人，不然就会单调了。你想你现在去吃饭，如果每个菜都是羊腿，那你是不是受不了？
记者：不是出于对内地票房的考虑么？
王家卫：你们现在的观念呐，现在都还是停留在香港导演北上掘金呐这种观念里，要不然就是一天到晚说我们要跟好莱坞去拼啊什么的，其实就是一个“饼”的问题，电影其实是没有分东西，没有分地域的，电影人就是那么纯粹。你说李安拍《少年派》，会硬要把孟加拉虎弄成东北虎，因为要北上掘金吗？肯定不是。你们现在的思维啊，有时候太功利了，在拍电影的时候，不会有这样的想法。
记者：章子怡演的宫二这个人物，感觉她性格上有很大的局限性，是因为您对那个时代女性的性格就是这样理解的么？
王家卫：小朋友你听着！在民国啊，有很多这样的女子的。施剑翘，她的父亲也是一个军阀，当年被孙传芳枪毙了，这个女人开始要给她的父亲去报仇，但开始她没有勇气，结果呢有个男人跟她说，我替你父亲报仇你就嫁给我，然后她就嫁给了他，结果这个男人也是蒙她的，等到她生了孩子之后，她知道这个男人是不可能做这件事的，于是她就决定自己去做这件事。因为那个时候孙传芳已经退下来了，是一个居士，在一个佛堂里面念经，这个女人就在他念经的时候把他打死了，全国那个时候都为她呼吁，说这个女人是为了报父仇，不应该判死刑，这是一个很伟大的故事。就是一个女人她托付了很多人，但最后发现唯一能去做这件事的人，只有她自己，所以她把生下来的孩子交给夫家，自己一个人去复仇了，这个就是民国的女人，她们刚烈的时候可以达到这个极致。
记者：那您以后还有什么计划再跟梁朝伟合作么？
王家卫：为什么不呢？我那么爱他，他也那么爱我。
Trouvé ici.
一代宗师 The Grandmaster
N.B. Sur The Grandmaster, vous avez travaillé avec Xu Haofeng, dont le film The Sword identity était présenté à Deauville l’an dernier. Pouvez-vous nous parler de votre collaboration et de ce qu’il a apporté au film ?
W.K.W. Qu’avez-vous pensé de son film ?
N.B. J’ai trouvé ça surprenant, différent, un film d’arts martiaux étrange, avec des éléments spirituels et très drôles également… un film atypique.
W.K.W. Il est lui-même une personnalité atypique. Il est aujourd’hui enseignant en école de cinéma et pratiquait assidument les arts martiaux dans sa jeunesse. Un jour, pour tester sa technique, il a sauté du troisième étage de l’académie de cinéma de Beijing et n’en est pas port. Il a été retenu par un arbre mais s’est blessé et s’est retrouvé arrêté pendant deux ans. Pendant ce temps, il a beaucoup médité et j’ai voulu le rencontrer après avoir lu son livre. Je trouve que son approche des arts martiaux est très intéressante, j’ai donc voulu qu’il devienne consultant sur The Grandmaster. Mais je lui ai ensuite demandé de co-écrire le script pour apporter un angle très original. Il est un initié des arts martiaux, et appartient à une école spécifique, il a donc apporté différentes approches de la philosophie des arts martiaux. Le film lui doit son aspect rituel.
N.G. Depuis quelques années à Hong Kong, les combats sont plus réalistes et brutaux, tandis que dans votre film ils sont plus poétiques, comme une danse. Pourquoi revenir à cette vision et ce style ?
W.K.W. En fait, les combats sont traités de différentes façons dans le film, avec comme dénominateur commun de rester le plus fidèle possible au style de combat. Cela signifie que les combats devaient être authentiques, fidèles aux compétences, et qu’il ne devait pas y avoir d’éléments un peu fous ou allant contre la loi de la pesanteur. Je crois que pour beaucoup de films de kunf fu, il s’agit avant tout de violence, tandis que d’une certaine façon, un maître en arts martiaux n’a besoin que d’un seul coup, tellement rapide qu’il est invisible. Il n’est jamais question de frapper pendant 5 minutes. Mais faire un film dans lequel un combat se limite à un seul coup est inenvisageable. Pour moi, il s’agit donc d’analyser ce mouvement, car chaque coup aussi mortel nait de la coordination entre le corps, le mouvement et la vitesse. Prolonger cet instant, ce coup, est mon travail et cela s’avère très difficile comme approche. C’est nouveau pour moi.
D’autre part, il y a dans ce film plusieurs grosses scènes de combat, chacune répondant à une raison différente. Pour la première, Ip Man est autour de la quarantaine, aristocrate, et ne vit pas grâce aux arts martiaux. Il s’agit pour lui d’un amusement. Le premier combat est presque une fête, la rue est son terrain de jeu, quelque chose qui lui permet de montrer ses compétences. Il y a une autre scène entre lui et le personnage interprété par Zhang Ziyi, dans un bordel. Il s’agit plus d’une danse entre deux maîtres qui se sont imposés cette règle de ne rien casser. Le dernier combat est une vengeance à la gare, et il n’est que question de vie et de mort. Donc chaque combat hérite d’une approche différente.
V.L. Avez-vous vu beaucoup de films d’arts martiaux, pour préparer The Grandmaster.
W.K.W. Non je ne les ai pas vus pour préparer le film. Mais quand nous étions enfants, nous étions abreuvés par ce genre. Donc j’ai vu ces films à différentes époques de ma vie. Des films de la Shaw Brothers ou même d’avant, ensuite Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Tsui Hark…
C.I.W. A Hong Kong, le film a reçu un excellent accueil critique et public. Êtes-vous satisfait du résultat et comment voyez-vous ce genre de film à Hong Kong ?
W.K.W. Je suis à la fois heureux et surpris, car le public réagit vraiment au film. C’est un genre qui est revisité et je vois le jeune public intéressé pour revisiter certains aspects de la culture des arts martiaux. Car The Grandmaster ne parle pas seulement d’artistes martiaux, c’est un film sur les origines de Hong Kong. Des années 30 aux années 50, il y a eu tellement d’immigrants fuyant la guerre en Chine. C’est donc un film sur les fondations de Hong Kong, de nouvelles personnes, du sang neuf qui ont créé le Hong Kong d’aujourd’hui.
M.S. La philosophie dans le film pousse à réfléchir aux différents courants de pensée derrière chaque école. Est-ce quelque chose que vous vouliez explorer pour peut-être pousser le public de Hong Kong à y penser également ?
W.K.W. Il est très difficile de faire un film de kung fu, il y en a eu tellement et qui se limitent à gagner ou perdre, qui est le meilleur combattant, à des histoires de revanche. Il était temps d’écrire une nouvelle page, et de faire un film non seulement sur les techniques, mais d’où elles viennent, quelle est la philosophie derrière chacune d’elle. Et je pense que ce qui différencie The Grandmaster des autres est qu’il aborde un aspect assez inédit : la notion d’héritage. C’est quelque chose que l’ancienne génération souhaite offrir à la nouvelle, et c’est un message fort du film.
C.F. Comment avez-vous travaillé les personnages avec les acteurs ? Et était-ce difficile de les convaincre de s’entrainer pendant si longtemps ?
W.K.W. Vous imaginez à quel point ces gens sont occupés donc oui, c’est difficile. Le fait est que vous ne pouvez pas leur dire qu’il faudra 3 ans pour faire le film. Mais c’est un véritable engagement de la part de Tony et Ziyi qui ont cru en ce projet, et ne l’ont pas lâché durant toute la production. Tony s’est cassé le bras deux fois pendant le tournage, et il n’a jamais abandonné. Il continuait à insister pour tourner lui-même les scènes d’action.
C.F. Etiez-vous confiant à propos de leur niveau technique, avant de commencer le tournage ? Car ils ont atteint un niveau professionnel.
W.K.W. Ils n’avaient pas le choix, sinon je les aurais poussés à poursuivre l’entrainement. En regardant le making of vous verrez à travers quelles douleurs ils sont passés, donc je suis certain qu’ils ont travaillé très dur.
M.S. Avec toute cette série de films, plus un autre arrivant prochainement, d’où vient cette fascination pour Ip Man ? Quel est son héritage à Hong Kong ?
W.K.W. Quand vous vous penchez sur la vie d’Ip Man, vous vous rendez compte qu’il est la réflexion de l’histoire récente de la république. Né sous une monarchie, il a vu l’apparition de la république, puis la guerre civile, la guerre sino-japonaise, pour finir dans une colonie britannique. Beaucoup de ces films se focalisent sur le personnage, sa technique, ses beaux combats, et aucun film pour voir Ip Man selon ce point de vue. Pourquoi il est devenu un maître ? Quelles épreuves a-t-il traversé ? Si vous comprenez d’où il vient, vous comprendrez sa grandeur. Il est né dans une ville conservatrice et le wing chun était réservée à une élite. Chaque génération en comptait que 16 élèves, apprendre cette technique était très cher. Ip Man est celui qui transforma cet art pour le rendre populaire et ne plus le réserver aux plus aisés.
N.B. A propos de la scène de la gare, la considériez-vous comme une scène-clé dès le départ ou pris-t-elle de l’importance au fur et à mesure ?
W.K.W. Au début du tournage, le plan était de commencer par la scène de Tony sous la pluie. On sait tous qu’il est un grand acteur, mais on ne sait pas à quel point il sait se battre. Le public se pose nécessairement la question et ne peut qu’être curieux de voir comment il va jouer un maître en arts martiaux. Donc nous avons commencé par cette scène et il s’est cassé la main pendant les répétitions, dès le premier jour. Nous devions donc changer nos plans car il était impossible de tourner cette séquence. Au départ nous avions prévu de tourner en Mandchourie deux mois plus tard, quand il ne faisait pas si froid. Nous sommes donc allés au Nord plus tôt que prévu pour tourner la séquence de la gare pendant deux mois à -25°C.
N.G. Combien de scènes coupées avez-vous avec Chang Chen, dont le personnage essentiel est assez peu présent à l’écran ? Et que représente-t-il ? La mafia ?
W.K.W. Pas la mafia non. Dans le film, il y a une scène où le père parle à sa fille, et on comprend que la force et la technique ne sont pas si importantes face au temps. Certains personnages sont dans la lumière et d’autres restent dans l’ombre. Le film est avant tout une question d’héritage. la première partie du film est à propos d’un vieux maître qui doit se retirer, cherche ses successeurs, ce qui ouvre plusieurs possibilités. Son successeur naturel échoue car il est trop agressif, sa fille ne peut pas lui succéder malgré son talent car l’époque n’a pas de place pour les femmes, et il reste Ip Man et La Lame (Chang Chen). Ces deux commencent plus ou moins de la même manière, vont à Hong Kong à la même période, ouvrent une école, et pourtant le premier finit grand maître quand l’autre devient barbier. Ce que j’aime dans ce personnage est qu’il est une sorte de miroir. Il a suivi le même chemin pour arriver à un autre résultat. The Grandmaster n’est pas un film sur une personne mais sur un état d’esprit, sujet aux variations.
V.L. À la fin du film, vous utilisez une musique d’Ennio Morricone. Est-ce un hommage à Il était une fois en Amérique ?
W.K.W. Nous avons plusieurs fois appelé ce film « Il était une fois le kung fu ». A la fin du film, nous avons utilisé un morceau d’Ennio Morricone qui constitue un hommage à Sergio Leone et son compositeur. Mais en même temps, je voulais souligner quelque chose. Aujourd’hui, très peu d’artistes font des films épiques comme lui en faisait. Épique ne veut pas dire grand, cela signifie qu’il s’agit d’un film dans lequel vous avez envie de passer du temps, un film à travers lequel vous vivez. Quand vous regardez certains films de Sergio Leone, vous ressentez cela.
C.I.W. Il existe plusieurs versions du film, dont une chinoise et une internationale. Laquelle préférez-vous et pourquoi ces deux montages ?
W.K.W. C’est le même film. 99% du film est identique. La seule différence est que j’ai raccourci la fin de la version internationale. la raison est simple, dans la version chinoise il y a des éléments qui ne peuvent être compris que par le public local. Par exemple, lorsque Ip Man dit le nom de la société pour laquelle travaillait son père, le public chinois comprend de suite qu’il s’agit d’une société d’import/export, chose impossible pour le public occidental. Nous avons donc fait des coupes et modifié la voix off, quelques ajustements pour rendre le film totalement accessible au public occidental. Concernant la fin, le montage chinois est plus ouvert et porté sur la spiritualité, tandis qu’ici la fin est plus précise.
M.S. Concernant la bonne réception du film par le jeune public, en quoi le public a changé au cours du temps ? Et voulez-vous toujours autant être un réalisateur hongkongais ?
W.K.W. Mais je suis un réalisateur hongkongais ! Et j’en suis extrêmement fier. A l’image de la scène du biscuit dans le film, il n’est pas question de jeunes, de vieux, de Nord ou de Sud, le monde est bien plus vaste que ça. Aujourd’hui le jeune public de Hong Kong se montre très réactif aux films qui abordent l’identité de la ville. Ils ont vu beaucoup de films chinois ou co-produits par la Chine, et ils veulent voir un cinéma qui représente Hong Kong et son identité.
M.S. C’est intéressant d’un point de vue politique.
W.K.W. C’est bien plus vaste que la politique. Hong Kong est comme un gigantesque centre commercial. Par exemple ici à Deauville, vous pouvez connaitre les magasins, comme la ville dans laquelle j’ai grandi. Les magasins peuvent être remplis de souvenirs, à l’inverse de Hong Kong où ce genre d’endroit n’existe plus. On dirait que toute la ville appartient à LVMH ou une autre grande marque. Vous vivez dans un grand centre commercial, donc vous avez besoin de retrouver votre identité et votre histoire.
N.G. On ne voit plus beaucoup Yuen Woo-ping faire l’acteur ces derniers temps. Comment l’avez-vous convaincu d’apparaitre dans The Grandmaster ?
W.K.W. Je l’ai forcé, je l’ai séduit. Yuen Woo-ping est quelqu’un de très timide. Il est un immense chorégraphe et sa présence sur le plateau fait de lui une sorte de parrain face à ses collaborateurs, mais dans la vraie vie il est très timide. J’ai réussi à le convaincre de faire cette apparition en lui disant qu’il n’y aurait que deux plans, que tout irait bien. Il était si nerveux…
C.I.W. Il se dit que The Grandmaster ne ressemble pas au style Wong Kar-wai. Que répondez-vous à ça ?
W.K.W. Personne ne fait de films pour le style. Le « style Wong Kar-wai », dans un sens oui, car je suis le réalisateur. Mais cette notion m’échappe tout de même. La façon de bouger ma caméra peut-être, qui quand elle est copiée rappelle mon style… je ne sais pas.
N.G. Peut-être que votre « style » est tout simplement de revisiter des genres très codés. Avez-vous en tête un autre genre que vous souhaitez aborder ?
W.K.W. En ce moment ? Pas du tout. Je veux juste me reposer un peu.
N.B. Vous avez travaillé avec un nouveau DP, Philippe Le Sourd, comment l’avez-vous choisi ?
W.K.W. Qu’en pensez-vous ?
N.B. Je n’en ai aucune idée…
W.K.W. Vous avez vu le film ? Vous avez aimé la photographie ? C’est la raison. En fait je travaille avec Philippe depuis longtemps, notamment sur un spot publicitaire. Il est très exigeant concernant les films sur lesquels il travaille car il est très attaché à sa famille et n’aime pas passer des mois loin d’eux. J’ai également dû le séduire pour travailler sur ce film. Il est fasciné par les arts martiaux, je lui ai donc dit de venir tourner un film de kung fu en Chine, que ça prendrait 6 mois… et nous avons passé deux noëls ensemble.
N.G. Pour revenir sur les combats, comment avez-vous travaillé avec Yuen Woo-ping ? Qui tenait la caméra ? Etait-il simple chorégraphe ou action director ?
W.K.W. Nous étions tous les deux sur le plateau. Normalement, il est seul chorégraphe mais sur ce tournage c’était différent, avec divers consultants. Donc nous étions en permanence en pleine discussion, lui, moi et les autres. Il fallait en permanence trouver un équilibre car les chorégraphies devaient être fidèles au style de combat, mais en même temps excitantes et évocatrices pour le public. Il fallait éviter trop d’abstraction.
C.I.W. Avez-vous des regrets sur ce film ?
W.K.W. Un film c’est comme la vie, et une vie sans regrets n’est pas drôle. Bien sur que j’ai des regrets. Si j’avais eu 3 ans de plus pour faire le film, cela aurait été parfait par exemple. Un de mes regrets est qu’à la fin du tournage, pour lequel nous avons utilisé de la pellicule, nous avons reçu un message de Fuji nous annonçant que la dernière livraison reçue serait définitivement la dernière, car la production de cette pellicule s’arrêtait alors. C’était comme un signal pour me dire qu’il fallait arrêter le tournage. J’ai d’ailleurs gardé une de ces dernières boîtes de film, car je suis un peu triste que nous devions dire adieu à la pellicule et à ces magnifiques caméras Panavision au profit de nouvelles caméras numériques…
Étaient présents à cette rencontre : Cyrille Falisse du Passeur Critique, Nicolas Bardot de FilmdeCulte, Victor Lopez d’Eastasia, Matthew Scott du South China Morning Post et Chung In Wong d’Esquire. Propos recueillis lors du Festival du Cinéma Asiatique de Deauville en mars 2013. Trouvés ici.
W.K.W. Qu’avez-vous pensé de son film ?
N.B. J’ai trouvé ça surprenant, différent, un film d’arts martiaux étrange, avec des éléments spirituels et très drôles également… un film atypique.
W.K.W. Il est lui-même une personnalité atypique. Il est aujourd’hui enseignant en école de cinéma et pratiquait assidument les arts martiaux dans sa jeunesse. Un jour, pour tester sa technique, il a sauté du troisième étage de l’académie de cinéma de Beijing et n’en est pas port. Il a été retenu par un arbre mais s’est blessé et s’est retrouvé arrêté pendant deux ans. Pendant ce temps, il a beaucoup médité et j’ai voulu le rencontrer après avoir lu son livre. Je trouve que son approche des arts martiaux est très intéressante, j’ai donc voulu qu’il devienne consultant sur The Grandmaster. Mais je lui ai ensuite demandé de co-écrire le script pour apporter un angle très original. Il est un initié des arts martiaux, et appartient à une école spécifique, il a donc apporté différentes approches de la philosophie des arts martiaux. Le film lui doit son aspect rituel.
N.G. Depuis quelques années à Hong Kong, les combats sont plus réalistes et brutaux, tandis que dans votre film ils sont plus poétiques, comme une danse. Pourquoi revenir à cette vision et ce style ?
W.K.W. En fait, les combats sont traités de différentes façons dans le film, avec comme dénominateur commun de rester le plus fidèle possible au style de combat. Cela signifie que les combats devaient être authentiques, fidèles aux compétences, et qu’il ne devait pas y avoir d’éléments un peu fous ou allant contre la loi de la pesanteur. Je crois que pour beaucoup de films de kunf fu, il s’agit avant tout de violence, tandis que d’une certaine façon, un maître en arts martiaux n’a besoin que d’un seul coup, tellement rapide qu’il est invisible. Il n’est jamais question de frapper pendant 5 minutes. Mais faire un film dans lequel un combat se limite à un seul coup est inenvisageable. Pour moi, il s’agit donc d’analyser ce mouvement, car chaque coup aussi mortel nait de la coordination entre le corps, le mouvement et la vitesse. Prolonger cet instant, ce coup, est mon travail et cela s’avère très difficile comme approche. C’est nouveau pour moi.
D’autre part, il y a dans ce film plusieurs grosses scènes de combat, chacune répondant à une raison différente. Pour la première, Ip Man est autour de la quarantaine, aristocrate, et ne vit pas grâce aux arts martiaux. Il s’agit pour lui d’un amusement. Le premier combat est presque une fête, la rue est son terrain de jeu, quelque chose qui lui permet de montrer ses compétences. Il y a une autre scène entre lui et le personnage interprété par Zhang Ziyi, dans un bordel. Il s’agit plus d’une danse entre deux maîtres qui se sont imposés cette règle de ne rien casser. Le dernier combat est une vengeance à la gare, et il n’est que question de vie et de mort. Donc chaque combat hérite d’une approche différente.
V.L. Avez-vous vu beaucoup de films d’arts martiaux, pour préparer The Grandmaster.
W.K.W. Non je ne les ai pas vus pour préparer le film. Mais quand nous étions enfants, nous étions abreuvés par ce genre. Donc j’ai vu ces films à différentes époques de ma vie. Des films de la Shaw Brothers ou même d’avant, ensuite Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Tsui Hark…
C.I.W. A Hong Kong, le film a reçu un excellent accueil critique et public. Êtes-vous satisfait du résultat et comment voyez-vous ce genre de film à Hong Kong ?
W.K.W. Je suis à la fois heureux et surpris, car le public réagit vraiment au film. C’est un genre qui est revisité et je vois le jeune public intéressé pour revisiter certains aspects de la culture des arts martiaux. Car The Grandmaster ne parle pas seulement d’artistes martiaux, c’est un film sur les origines de Hong Kong. Des années 30 aux années 50, il y a eu tellement d’immigrants fuyant la guerre en Chine. C’est donc un film sur les fondations de Hong Kong, de nouvelles personnes, du sang neuf qui ont créé le Hong Kong d’aujourd’hui.
M.S. La philosophie dans le film pousse à réfléchir aux différents courants de pensée derrière chaque école. Est-ce quelque chose que vous vouliez explorer pour peut-être pousser le public de Hong Kong à y penser également ?
W.K.W. Il est très difficile de faire un film de kung fu, il y en a eu tellement et qui se limitent à gagner ou perdre, qui est le meilleur combattant, à des histoires de revanche. Il était temps d’écrire une nouvelle page, et de faire un film non seulement sur les techniques, mais d’où elles viennent, quelle est la philosophie derrière chacune d’elle. Et je pense que ce qui différencie The Grandmaster des autres est qu’il aborde un aspect assez inédit : la notion d’héritage. C’est quelque chose que l’ancienne génération souhaite offrir à la nouvelle, et c’est un message fort du film.
C.F. Comment avez-vous travaillé les personnages avec les acteurs ? Et était-ce difficile de les convaincre de s’entrainer pendant si longtemps ?
W.K.W. Vous imaginez à quel point ces gens sont occupés donc oui, c’est difficile. Le fait est que vous ne pouvez pas leur dire qu’il faudra 3 ans pour faire le film. Mais c’est un véritable engagement de la part de Tony et Ziyi qui ont cru en ce projet, et ne l’ont pas lâché durant toute la production. Tony s’est cassé le bras deux fois pendant le tournage, et il n’a jamais abandonné. Il continuait à insister pour tourner lui-même les scènes d’action.
C.F. Etiez-vous confiant à propos de leur niveau technique, avant de commencer le tournage ? Car ils ont atteint un niveau professionnel.
W.K.W. Ils n’avaient pas le choix, sinon je les aurais poussés à poursuivre l’entrainement. En regardant le making of vous verrez à travers quelles douleurs ils sont passés, donc je suis certain qu’ils ont travaillé très dur.
M.S. Avec toute cette série de films, plus un autre arrivant prochainement, d’où vient cette fascination pour Ip Man ? Quel est son héritage à Hong Kong ?
W.K.W. Quand vous vous penchez sur la vie d’Ip Man, vous vous rendez compte qu’il est la réflexion de l’histoire récente de la république. Né sous une monarchie, il a vu l’apparition de la république, puis la guerre civile, la guerre sino-japonaise, pour finir dans une colonie britannique. Beaucoup de ces films se focalisent sur le personnage, sa technique, ses beaux combats, et aucun film pour voir Ip Man selon ce point de vue. Pourquoi il est devenu un maître ? Quelles épreuves a-t-il traversé ? Si vous comprenez d’où il vient, vous comprendrez sa grandeur. Il est né dans une ville conservatrice et le wing chun était réservée à une élite. Chaque génération en comptait que 16 élèves, apprendre cette technique était très cher. Ip Man est celui qui transforma cet art pour le rendre populaire et ne plus le réserver aux plus aisés.
N.B. A propos de la scène de la gare, la considériez-vous comme une scène-clé dès le départ ou pris-t-elle de l’importance au fur et à mesure ?
W.K.W. Au début du tournage, le plan était de commencer par la scène de Tony sous la pluie. On sait tous qu’il est un grand acteur, mais on ne sait pas à quel point il sait se battre. Le public se pose nécessairement la question et ne peut qu’être curieux de voir comment il va jouer un maître en arts martiaux. Donc nous avons commencé par cette scène et il s’est cassé la main pendant les répétitions, dès le premier jour. Nous devions donc changer nos plans car il était impossible de tourner cette séquence. Au départ nous avions prévu de tourner en Mandchourie deux mois plus tard, quand il ne faisait pas si froid. Nous sommes donc allés au Nord plus tôt que prévu pour tourner la séquence de la gare pendant deux mois à -25°C.
N.G. Combien de scènes coupées avez-vous avec Chang Chen, dont le personnage essentiel est assez peu présent à l’écran ? Et que représente-t-il ? La mafia ?
W.K.W. Pas la mafia non. Dans le film, il y a une scène où le père parle à sa fille, et on comprend que la force et la technique ne sont pas si importantes face au temps. Certains personnages sont dans la lumière et d’autres restent dans l’ombre. Le film est avant tout une question d’héritage. la première partie du film est à propos d’un vieux maître qui doit se retirer, cherche ses successeurs, ce qui ouvre plusieurs possibilités. Son successeur naturel échoue car il est trop agressif, sa fille ne peut pas lui succéder malgré son talent car l’époque n’a pas de place pour les femmes, et il reste Ip Man et La Lame (Chang Chen). Ces deux commencent plus ou moins de la même manière, vont à Hong Kong à la même période, ouvrent une école, et pourtant le premier finit grand maître quand l’autre devient barbier. Ce que j’aime dans ce personnage est qu’il est une sorte de miroir. Il a suivi le même chemin pour arriver à un autre résultat. The Grandmaster n’est pas un film sur une personne mais sur un état d’esprit, sujet aux variations.
V.L. À la fin du film, vous utilisez une musique d’Ennio Morricone. Est-ce un hommage à Il était une fois en Amérique ?
W.K.W. Nous avons plusieurs fois appelé ce film « Il était une fois le kung fu ». A la fin du film, nous avons utilisé un morceau d’Ennio Morricone qui constitue un hommage à Sergio Leone et son compositeur. Mais en même temps, je voulais souligner quelque chose. Aujourd’hui, très peu d’artistes font des films épiques comme lui en faisait. Épique ne veut pas dire grand, cela signifie qu’il s’agit d’un film dans lequel vous avez envie de passer du temps, un film à travers lequel vous vivez. Quand vous regardez certains films de Sergio Leone, vous ressentez cela.
C.I.W. Il existe plusieurs versions du film, dont une chinoise et une internationale. Laquelle préférez-vous et pourquoi ces deux montages ?
W.K.W. C’est le même film. 99% du film est identique. La seule différence est que j’ai raccourci la fin de la version internationale. la raison est simple, dans la version chinoise il y a des éléments qui ne peuvent être compris que par le public local. Par exemple, lorsque Ip Man dit le nom de la société pour laquelle travaillait son père, le public chinois comprend de suite qu’il s’agit d’une société d’import/export, chose impossible pour le public occidental. Nous avons donc fait des coupes et modifié la voix off, quelques ajustements pour rendre le film totalement accessible au public occidental. Concernant la fin, le montage chinois est plus ouvert et porté sur la spiritualité, tandis qu’ici la fin est plus précise.
M.S. Concernant la bonne réception du film par le jeune public, en quoi le public a changé au cours du temps ? Et voulez-vous toujours autant être un réalisateur hongkongais ?
W.K.W. Mais je suis un réalisateur hongkongais ! Et j’en suis extrêmement fier. A l’image de la scène du biscuit dans le film, il n’est pas question de jeunes, de vieux, de Nord ou de Sud, le monde est bien plus vaste que ça. Aujourd’hui le jeune public de Hong Kong se montre très réactif aux films qui abordent l’identité de la ville. Ils ont vu beaucoup de films chinois ou co-produits par la Chine, et ils veulent voir un cinéma qui représente Hong Kong et son identité.
M.S. C’est intéressant d’un point de vue politique.
W.K.W. C’est bien plus vaste que la politique. Hong Kong est comme un gigantesque centre commercial. Par exemple ici à Deauville, vous pouvez connaitre les magasins, comme la ville dans laquelle j’ai grandi. Les magasins peuvent être remplis de souvenirs, à l’inverse de Hong Kong où ce genre d’endroit n’existe plus. On dirait que toute la ville appartient à LVMH ou une autre grande marque. Vous vivez dans un grand centre commercial, donc vous avez besoin de retrouver votre identité et votre histoire.
N.G. On ne voit plus beaucoup Yuen Woo-ping faire l’acteur ces derniers temps. Comment l’avez-vous convaincu d’apparaitre dans The Grandmaster ?
W.K.W. Je l’ai forcé, je l’ai séduit. Yuen Woo-ping est quelqu’un de très timide. Il est un immense chorégraphe et sa présence sur le plateau fait de lui une sorte de parrain face à ses collaborateurs, mais dans la vraie vie il est très timide. J’ai réussi à le convaincre de faire cette apparition en lui disant qu’il n’y aurait que deux plans, que tout irait bien. Il était si nerveux…
C.I.W. Il se dit que The Grandmaster ne ressemble pas au style Wong Kar-wai. Que répondez-vous à ça ?
W.K.W. Personne ne fait de films pour le style. Le « style Wong Kar-wai », dans un sens oui, car je suis le réalisateur. Mais cette notion m’échappe tout de même. La façon de bouger ma caméra peut-être, qui quand elle est copiée rappelle mon style… je ne sais pas.
N.G. Peut-être que votre « style » est tout simplement de revisiter des genres très codés. Avez-vous en tête un autre genre que vous souhaitez aborder ?
W.K.W. En ce moment ? Pas du tout. Je veux juste me reposer un peu.
N.B. Vous avez travaillé avec un nouveau DP, Philippe Le Sourd, comment l’avez-vous choisi ?
W.K.W. Qu’en pensez-vous ?
N.B. Je n’en ai aucune idée…
W.K.W. Vous avez vu le film ? Vous avez aimé la photographie ? C’est la raison. En fait je travaille avec Philippe depuis longtemps, notamment sur un spot publicitaire. Il est très exigeant concernant les films sur lesquels il travaille car il est très attaché à sa famille et n’aime pas passer des mois loin d’eux. J’ai également dû le séduire pour travailler sur ce film. Il est fasciné par les arts martiaux, je lui ai donc dit de venir tourner un film de kung fu en Chine, que ça prendrait 6 mois… et nous avons passé deux noëls ensemble.
N.G. Pour revenir sur les combats, comment avez-vous travaillé avec Yuen Woo-ping ? Qui tenait la caméra ? Etait-il simple chorégraphe ou action director ?
W.K.W. Nous étions tous les deux sur le plateau. Normalement, il est seul chorégraphe mais sur ce tournage c’était différent, avec divers consultants. Donc nous étions en permanence en pleine discussion, lui, moi et les autres. Il fallait en permanence trouver un équilibre car les chorégraphies devaient être fidèles au style de combat, mais en même temps excitantes et évocatrices pour le public. Il fallait éviter trop d’abstraction.
C.I.W. Avez-vous des regrets sur ce film ?
W.K.W. Un film c’est comme la vie, et une vie sans regrets n’est pas drôle. Bien sur que j’ai des regrets. Si j’avais eu 3 ans de plus pour faire le film, cela aurait été parfait par exemple. Un de mes regrets est qu’à la fin du tournage, pour lequel nous avons utilisé de la pellicule, nous avons reçu un message de Fuji nous annonçant que la dernière livraison reçue serait définitivement la dernière, car la production de cette pellicule s’arrêtait alors. C’était comme un signal pour me dire qu’il fallait arrêter le tournage. J’ai d’ailleurs gardé une de ces dernières boîtes de film, car je suis un peu triste que nous devions dire adieu à la pellicule et à ces magnifiques caméras Panavision au profit de nouvelles caméras numériques…
Étaient présents à cette rencontre : Cyrille Falisse du Passeur Critique, Nicolas Bardot de FilmdeCulte, Victor Lopez d’Eastasia, Matthew Scott du South China Morning Post et Chung In Wong d’Esquire. Propos recueillis lors du Festival du Cinéma Asiatique de Deauville en mars 2013. Trouvés ici.
一代宗师 The Grandmaster
南方周末：你对民国的怀念在哪里？
王家卫：并非我对民国特别情有独钟，只不过是这戏以叶问为主线，而叶问这一生就是一个活生生的民国历史。民国是中国武术的黄金时代，那时大家都认为需要一个强国，这是个独特的时代，从武术家身上我们看到很多那个年代家国情怀的东西。很多电影会写我们现实的一面，我希望这部电影能体现出中国人美的一面。
譬如说宫老爷子跟他师兄丁连山的关系，他们就是愿意成为一个面子，也愿意成为里子，因为大家有一个不同的责任，那一别就是三十年，对宫老爷子来说，他会认为练武之人轻生死重离别，这不是一般民族会有的。
南方周末：“里子”和“面子”怎么理解？
王家卫：炖蛇羹那场戏，你要留意一下丁连山说离开东北是1905年。那年中国历史上有件大事，就是“北方暗杀团”的吴樾行刺（满清出洋）五大臣。吴樾、张容那一批北方豪杰，要把满清推翻，他们以暗杀为方法。
梁启超说那个年代是暗杀年代。推翻满清，一是共和、革命，一种就是最激烈的，暗杀。一明一暗。
他们认为推翻满清不能用温和的政治运动，必须要用极端手段，就是暗杀。丁连山和宫宝森分手的时候，丁连山问宫宝森，掌一个门户容易还是浪迹天涯容易。宫宝森说当然是掌一个门户容易。那丁连山就说，他就去做那件不容易的事。
这是真有其事的：一个日本浪人叫薄无鬼，在东北奉天大街上，用武士刀画一个圈，说这是日本领土，进来就死。这是圈套，结果很多热血的国人都去挑战，死了。圈越来越大。丁连山把薄无鬼干掉，从此离开东北走进“鬼道”，他也得了外号叫“关东之鬼”。
宫宝森就是“面子”，接替师兄做中华武士会的会长。中华武士会，明里是武术救国，暗中就是北方暗杀团。就像日本的柳生家族有“明柳生”和“暗柳生”，明就是将军家的教练，暗的都是专事暗杀的隐者。
故事特别动人，但是因为赵本山老师那个时候身体不行，所以没办法把他那条线拍得更仔细。
南方周末：影片里你安排了很多人，在面对同一个问题时，他们各自做了完全相反的选择。
王家卫：从清末民国，到抗战，到香港，这是一个大时代，里面发生了多少事。大时代里，每个人要选择，有一些人会继续往前，有一些人宁愿留下，有一些做了一个错误的选择。
面对这样的时代，其实生活才是最高的高度，不管你的武艺有多高，生活才是非常难越过的高山，它可以消灭你的意志，蹉跎你的事业。最后电影里很多人都可以成为一代宗师，章子怡可以，一线天可以，马三也有这个能耐。但最后只有叶问走到了最后，把祖宗留下来的东西传了下去。
南方周末：所以你觉得叶问其实才真正越过了最高的高山。
王家卫：对。当年很多人认为，武功秘籍每代传人不要超过16人，不要传外人。但叶问到香港后就把咏春发扬光大。他们说他把咏春最古典的精神弄没了，所以说是因他而起，因他而终。但对叶问来说，他没门户之见，认为武术应该是大统。
南方周末：除了大选择之外，电影里还有两个关键词，转身和回头。
王家卫：我为什么把叶问跟章子怡对立，他们是一阳一阴。武功上也是，因为咏春拳基本上是直线的，只有眼前路。最主要的是面对面，他认为两点之间直线最短。但章子怡的八卦掌，认为两点之间最短但不一定是最快。她会绕圈，走到你背后。这也代表了两种人生态度，一种人眼睛永远望着前面，章子怡是永远看后面，到最后她宁愿留下，因为她一生都在回头。
所以为什么梁朝伟说你缺一个转身，你没往前看。那老猿挂印的那个回首望月，就是说很多时候回头是一种想，一种反思，但有时候也是怀旧。
南方周末：张震演“一线天”，与梁朝伟演的叶问没有对手戏，他们应该是怎样的关系？
王家卫：他和梁朝伟平行——都是武功高强，经历苦难，最后都到了香港，都为生活做了并非自己理想的事。最后都是开宗立派，但一个有了光环，成为一代宗师，另一个就成了一代理发师。也就是戏里说的人活一世，有的活成了“面子”，有的活成了“里子”，能耐是其次的，都是时势使然。但是其实更动人的是，很多人默默在做很多事情，他们没有光环，他们默默地把祖宗传下来的东西，一路传下去。
南方周末：所以更动人的是那些“一代理发师”？
王家卫：我小时候，家下面有一个理发厅，小的时候就听说很多身怀绝技的高手都混到里面，到了香港之后就是地头蛇。
张震演的一线天，原型其实来自两个人，第一个人是八极拳的大师，叫李书文。他出手不留情，但是他人非常懒，他说有用的一招就够。另外一个是台湾的大师，叫刘云樵。他在民国时代也是一个特工，也是为了抗日做了很多事情，之后到了台湾也是发扬八极拳。
很多人都身怀绝技，有些人能拿到光环，那是因为他有这个机遇。但是没有这个机遇不代表你不需要做这些事，有些人没有这个光环，但是一路在保存祖宗存下来的东西，我认为这个也是很重要的东西。
南方周末：武林人士在风月场所“金楼”聚会，有句解释也很好，叫“风尘之中必有性情中人”。这是研究史料找到的，还是你自己的感悟？
王家卫：是我的感悟。你要注意到这个金楼叫“共和楼”。宫老爷子讲“我一辈子做成三件事”之前，其实还有另外一段话。但可能太长。他说我那年带着一帮人从东北，穿着皮袄一路脱，进关内，到佛山，进了金楼才知道自个儿是土包子。这里的景是满室描金一尘不染……但我们不是来嫖的，我们到金楼，是来送一个炸弹。炸弹是蔡元培先生配制的，三天之后，就炸了广州将军凤山，民国就此开始。所以这个楼叫共和楼。它是一个风尘之地，但里面都是英雄。
因为没有了这一段，很多人就说为什么这些武林中人都在“堂子”里面。要知道溥仪的退位诏书，都是那几个执笔的人躲在堂子里写的——不能让人知道，大隐隐于市。
南方周末：还有一句“念念不忘，必有回响”，念念不忘的是什么？
王家卫：念念不忘是自己的初衷，叫做不改初衷是英雄。不迷不成家，你必须要对你的事业念念不忘，你要专注，不断地灌水的时候，结果这个树才会长出来。
他们第一代的中华武术会的人说，强国强族，武术救国。那个蛇羹就是他们的初衷和理念。他们希望把这个理念继续下去。宫宝森是一个很伟大的老人，他在叶问身上看到了这个希望，所以他最后承认自己输了，他说我把我的名声借给你。这就是期望你可以把这个火把继续下去。
南方周末：宫二打败马三，关键的招数是两手托住对方下巴推出去，宫宝森死的那场也用这招。这是你从美感上作出的选择，还是从八卦掌专业角度，就该用这个动作？
王家卫：我希望电影的招数跟剧情是配合的。我看到形意拳有一手，叫“老猿挂印”，其实很简单，用膝盖撞到你的胸骨，叫挂印。这是要死人的。马三那个时候给日本人做事，希望“挂印”，但宫宝森告诉他这一招的关隘是“回头”，我认为这刚好跟剧情契合：老爷子希望他回头，但他没有回头。章子怡那招叫“叶里藏花”，破他的“老猿挂印”。这是文戏武唱。
南方周末：拍武打戏的时候，演员的武术师傅和八爷（动作指导袁和平）同时在场，他们对武术动作的观点肯定不一样。谁最后说了算？
王家卫：这是这次拍戏最微妙的地方。对八爷这样的电影武行来说，有句话：小孩、狗、教头，是最难搞的。小孩，你要教他打功夫是很难搞的；动物不用说，更难；还有就是教头，因为他们都有自己固定的观念——这样不行，不是我们门派的东西。但这次融合得比较好，因为大家都有很明确的目标，就是各个门派的一招一式，都要标准。取舍在于，有时候这一招不规范，但会好看，也还在情理之中。当中的平衡是在这里。
那些老师永远就跟你说，（我们门派的东西）一手就死了。你不能永远都是一手啊，那这个电影就完蛋了，不能看了。黑泽明那种，刀剑还可以，拳脚不能这么做。
南方周末：你寻访民间武术高手的过程里，有的师傅会表示，愿意让自家功夫出现在影片里，但条件是不能输给咏春。你怎么看这个问题？
王家卫：所以到最后我要非常感谢王世泉老师还有几位八卦掌的老师，他们没有计较这个。一般来说，你这个电影是讲叶问的，那我们门派是输还是赢？我们这个不能输的，输了我们就是罪人了。我解释给他们听，这个电影不是只有一个宗师，也不是讨论输赢的问题。最后这些老师很信任我，这是我的幸运。
其实这个戏里所有的武功，有些地方是很有趣的。比如叶问和宫老爷子掰饼这一场，一般人不知道为什么梁朝伟一次是掌心向上，一次是掌心向下。要是行家你会知道，掌心向上的叫阳手，一般来说就是“慈悲”——你的重心从地下上来，会伤人不会死人；阴手就是“超度”了。叶问试过阳手，试过阴手，他知道都不是方法，最后用了听桥，就好像咏春的黏手，也跟太极的推手一样，就是听你的劲儿，跟着你走。所以其实很过瘾的。但是有些东西要内行看才会说，哎，王导还是懂一点哦！
南方周末：片头叶问的台词是“功夫两个字，一横一竖，输的躺下，站着的才有资格说话”，这是否是推崇赢者战略？
王家卫：不是，不是赢者的战略。武术到最后其实讲得就是一个艺术。中国门派功夫120多种，每一门每一派都有他们的手法，到最后这是一个手段，最后的目的，要不就是躺下要不就是站着。只有站着才是对的。人家说你的拳不是很重，我的拳比你更重。没有什么可以讨论，在武林当中比一下就知道了。
高手其实一摸手就知道高低。以前的人，要给彼此面子，给台阶下，我觉得这是最有趣的。要毁一个人的名声，是很大的事情，因为他不代表个人，而是代表门派，两个门派之间的仇就会没完没了。
南方周末：三年寻访民间宗师，你对现在的武林状况有什么感受？
王家卫：中国武术现在分开两个部分：一是体制内的竞技武术，把武术运动化，没有门派观念，都是套路。但没有门派就没有传承，没有师徒关系。其实以前中国人说的“手把手教”是很重要的，因为有些事情是口传心授，你必须要练到某个程度，火候到了，师傅捅一下，豁然开朗。民间的传统武术的发展让人担心。现在这个时代，父母不会让孩子从小去练武术，都是练个跆拳道、画画、弹钢琴……练武是不可能的。我访问过的不少老师，都是五十多岁，他说我们是下岗以后才可能重新练，我们这个门派里最年轻的徒弟都是50多了。你说担不担心。穷文富武，你为了生活不可能练的。
Trouvé ici.
Wong Kar Wai 王家卫
Han Ong In the winter of 1994, the Rosemary Theater here in Chinatown did a retrospective of your work and I had the good luck of seeing all your films in chronological order. It was a great accident to see them all together. If you could look back at your body of work and pin down a “Wong Kar-wai signature,” even as far back as As Tears Go By, you already had the blurry, step-frame scenes of violence.
Wong Kar-wai As Tears Go By was my first film, and at that time John Woo had just made A Better Tomorrow and everybody in Hong Kong was making gangster films. I thought, “What else can I do?” So I made Days of Being Wild and borrowed its form from MTV.
HO When you say an MTV “form,” do you mean the quick cuts?
WKW Yeah, it’s more fragmented. Most of the filmmaking in Hong Kong, even now, is very lyrical, very smooth, and always very traditional. Of course MTV has become something very formulaic, but in the late eighties, when it was first shown in Hong Kong, we were all really impressed with the energy and the fragmented structure. It seemed like we should go in this direction. About the step-printing process, in effect it’s an answer to John Woo’s use of slow motion. We did it in reverse and shot with a faster speed, which turned out to be something like step-printing.
HO Days of Being Wild has been described as a Chinese Rebel Without a Cause — have you heard this before?
WKW No.
HO It was a shorthand description a critic and friend used. It wasn’t meant to be definitive, but suggestive.
WKW The fact is that when Western films are shown in Hong Kong they have a Chinese title. The Chinese title of Rebel Without a Cause was Days of Being Wild.
HO So it was wrong of him to extrapolate from that that this was a Chinese version of Rebel Without a Cause.
WKW Yes. In fact that’s also the case in Happy Together. When Antonioni’s Blow Up was shown in Hong Kong the Chinese title was not exactly “happy together,” but “the first gleam of the spring light.” (laughter)
HO But when you appropriated the title Days of Being Wild — was there meant to be a slight reference? There are some surface similarities: it’s about good-looking young men…
WKW Rebel Without a Cause in Chinese becomes “our faith,” which is a term that was used very typically in the sixties about kids like James Dean, or kids who imitated James Dean. They came from rich families, had nothing to do, they weren’t happy with their lives and were trying to be different. It was a typical ’60s symptom.
HO So the title was a means of getting at that time period. Another trademark of yours is the slow-mo tracking shot: of the palm trees swaying with that beautiful soundtrack in Days of Being Wild. I remember a guitar strumming as Leslie Cheung was walking into the shop where the soda girl worked. It’s very romantic. It’s lush in the way that perhaps young American filmmakers are afraid to be because it’s part of the legacy of the fifties’ studio films. Young American filmmakers’ response to that is to be hip and cynical. They don’t want to be seen as corny and syrupy. But you, on the other hand, do it, and you keep doing it, and do it with such faith in its power and with such love. In other words, you’re not winking.
WKW I make films mostly by instinct, and I tried to make the stories in Days of Being Wild in different styles: sometimes as in Hollywood B-movies where there’s a long take and it’s very melodramatic; and sometimes I just wanted to make it like a Bergman film with lots of close-ups. I had fun in Days of Being Wild. I really enjoyed it, although it was painful to make because we had so many problems and in the end it wasn’t a big commercial success. The producer didn’t make the sequel because he thought it was too risky. After my first film, As Tears Go By, everybody expected another very commercial film with the six hottest young idols in Hong Kong.
HO Who were also in Days of Being Wild?
WKW Right. And the image of the palm trees, like the waterfall in Happy Together — all these shots remind me of nature. People should be very humble towards the natural world. Fassbinder said, he tries to show change by showing something which never changes. In this case, the waterfall never changes, the people keep changing.
HO So it’s a contrast between the constant changing vicissitudes of life as manifested in the characters, and nature, which simply exists. After Days of Being Wild you were working on Ashes of Time, which actually took two years to complete. It’s been said that during that time you were frustrated and started working on Chungking Express as a way to clear your mind. Paradoxically, Chungking took a very short time between its conception and completion. Was Ashes of Time a project initiated by you or was it something your producers recommended—maybe after the commercial disappointment of Days of Being Wild it was something they felt would be easier for you—to have another commercial hit with a commercial genre.
WKW Of course that was the thinking of the producers. After Days of Being Wild it took me a while to find a producer who was willing to finance my film.
HO How long did that take?
WKW About a year. I had an idea to make a film about two women: the Evil East and the Malicious West. I borrowed these two characters from a novel by Louis Chua, The Eagle Shooting Hero, which is very popular. The producers suggested, “Instead of making a film about the two women, why not make the novel into a film?” I thought it would be fun. I’ve always wanted to make a costume drama.
HO When was this novel written?
WKW Around 1950. It is the most popular book, second only to The Little Red Book by Chairman Mao. Everybody knows about this novel, and when we were students we were crazy about it. But to make it into a film… after rereading it, I didn’t think I liked it that much. The two characters I had originally wanted to develop, the Evil East and the Malicious West, were still the only characters who interested me. And in the novel they are already seventy-something. I thought instead of making a film about these two old women, I’d begin to think of their younger days. So rather than rewriting the novel, I invented prologues to it. It took almost two years to finish this project.
HO For what reasons?
WKW We had ten of the most famous movie stars in Asia, and their schedules were impossible, and we were shooting in Hong Kong and in northern China, which is a desert. I was also the co-producer of the film, which was so painful. I had to think really carefully about every decision I made because it costs a lot of money and time. It’s not fun to make a film like this. After we completed the film and had finished the post-production, it was April already and we knew the film was going to compete in the Venice Film Festival at the end of September. That meant we had four months without anything to do, and I thought, I should have a holiday. So I made a film.
HO Your way of having a holiday is making another film?
WKW Yes, I thought I should do something to make myself feel comfortable about making films again. So I made Chungking Express, which I made like a student film. After Ashes of Time I decided that if I wanted to be a director, I had to know exactly what my space was in the market. If I was going to make big expensive films, that meant I had to face mass audiences. And not all of my material is for mass audiences.
HO That’s a key realization.
WKW You try to cope with the mass audience, but in fact you are not doing something for them—I would be fighting with myself. I thought, I don’t have to make big films, I can make small films that I can be happy with. I can find my own audience. So I made Chungking Express with a very low budget, and we made the film very quickly, only six weeks from the idea to the edit.
HO Was the script written in process, or was it written before the production began?
WKW As a writer, I always have some short stories in my mind which have not yet developed into a script, and I just picked out three and said, “Okay, let’s start shooting.” I wrote in the daytime and we shot at night. We were shooting in chronological order.
HO So you wrote the movie as you went along, you didn’t hodgepodge it, or skip around and decide later in the editing room that this was the order? You already knew?
WKW I didn’t know what would happen tomorrow, but I knew what had happened today. After I finished a day of shooting, then I knew what would happen next. We were going step by step, and because I had so much fun making the first part, I made the film too long. So I skipped the third story.
HO The third story became Fallen Angels. Of all your films my favorite is Chungking Express. What stays in my mind is its romantic quality, the protagonist’s voice-over in the beginning of the film: When he bumps into Brigitte Lin in the marketplace and says, “I was this close to the woman I would fall in love with 24 hours later.” Physical proximity is going to translate into an emotional proximity. The lushness of that romanticism, without being corny, was like a very good pop song.
WKW But for me it is very Chinese. In Chinese there is a term which is very difficult to translate into English, it is something like “chances.” It means: Why am I sitting here having this interview with you instead of somebody else? Why should we meet here? This is about chances, and I think all my films are about chances.
HO What I was referring to was the highly romantic nature—not just that it’s coincidence, meeting and not meeting which is part of living in a large city—but the treatment, which to me was very atypical of most of the Hong Kong movies which treat romance in a giggly way. I cringe watching them. But somehow in your film I felt myself opening up. It wasn’t embarrassing, in fact, far from it, it was a great pop song with a refrain that stayed in your mind.
Whereas Chungking was sunshiny and suffused with bright, lovely daytime colors, Fallen Angels is more about neon, and night time, and grunge. It’s also the difference between the ingenue of Fay Wang and the eyeshadow-wearing German chanteuse aura of Michelle Reis, who plays the booking agent.
WKW You’re right, because to me Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long. I always think these two films should be seen together as a double bill. In fact, people asked me during an interview for Chungking Express: “You’ve made these two stories which have no relationship at all to each other, how can you connect them?” And I said, “The main characters of Chungking Express are not Fay Wang or Takashi Kaneshiro, but the city itself, the night and day of Hong Kong. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels together are the bright and dark of Hong Kong.” I see the films as inter-reversible, the character of Fay Wang could be the character of Takashi in Fallen Angels; Brigitte Lin in Chungking could be Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. All of their characters are inter-reversible. Also, in Chungking we were shooting from a very long distance with long lenses, but the characters seem close to us.
HO Would that account for the freshness and intimacy with which the actors interacted with each other?
WKW Yes. And in Fallen Angels the characters were shot with an extremely wide angle. The camera is very close to the actors, but they seem far away. The purpose of the cameras in both films is that they are just like civilian cameras.
HO Like surveillance.
WKW Yes, they are always there watching people’s behavior. In fact, they are the other main characters in the film. The purpose is the same, but we’re using different approaches: Chungking is so far but so close; Fallen Angels is so close but so far.
HO That’s very enlightening, because for me Chungking seemed much more expansive, more airy. And what I got from it was joy. I felt so transported watching it, even though I had to get used to your sense of timing. These languorous moments fill out the body of the film and are interspersed with sudden ventings or bursts of violence, people chasing each other on the street, and that great montage of Brigitte Lin organizing the dope smuggling with the Indian family. They’re great bursts and then you see these longeurs where nothing much happens and your sense of time gets distended—particularly in the latter half of the film when it’s primarily about Fay Wang developing a huge crush on Tony Leung. It makes sense now that you say you were shooting the actors from far away. There’s a nice feeling of not being intruded upon; but in Fallen Angels I get cramped.
WKW As I said, the main character in these two films is the city, the Midnight Express fast food shop, because if that shop could talk… It’s always there but the people keep changing.
HO I don’t know if I buy that. I say this not out of any disrespect, but it underestimates the vibrancy, the charisma of specific actors. The idea may be the abstract concept of this inanimate object being passed into and out of by different characters, but what you end up responding to are the lives you see embodied by those characters.
WKW Of course, people are more affected by actors or acting. But as a filmmaker, I need some logic. And this was my logic in making these two films, and how I connected these stories and these films together. People say my films don’t have any plot or storyline, but in my logic there is a storyline.
HO The constant being the place, and then the idea of ships passing through the night.
WKW Yes.
HO Let’s talk a bit about Fallen Angels. My response to Fallen Angels, as I said, is set up by the idea of night and day, or light and dark. I lived in Los Angeles for ten years, and I moved to New York three years ago. With that move, my tastes in film and music and everything changed considerably. I would probably love Fallen Angels if I still lived in L.A., but now that I live in New York, where joy is in such short quantity—where you ride the subway and people’s faces are so downcast, living billboards of discontent—it seems that Fallen Angels is a redundant reminder of that. When I was living in L.A., I wanted unhappiness. To balance my diet. That’s why I used to love Fassbinder, he seemed to have a predetermined goal to be unpleasant. Now I respond more to Chungking’s sunshine than I do to the grunge of Fallen Angels.
WKW I asked you before if you like sweet things.
HO I do, I love ice cream. And it’s a recent thing, I never used to have a sweet tooth.
WKW Mmm-hmm.
HO So, that’s my spiel about light and dark.
WKW Yes, the light side and the dark side, this is one of the reasons that I made Fallen Angels. It’s fair to show both sides of a coin.
HO What I responded to in Fallen Angels were the groovy parts: The scenes where Leon Lai plays the hitman and he’s walking to his assignments with the Massive Attack soundtrack.
WKW I wanted to use Massive Attack’s music, but it was too expensive, so I asked my composer in Hong Kong to do something like Massive Attack.
HO Well it’s very successful. It’s an iconic, cool moment. People might criticize it as being synthetic or…
WKW I like the term synthetic. In fact, his part is synthetic. It is my impression of Leon Lai, who is a very professional actor—so professional that he works everything according to the arrangement of his manager. So I thought I should put his character in this form. If he’s going to kill somebody, he must behave like a killer. Everything is image. And his character is incapable of communicating, of contact with real people. Even with his schoolmate…
HO Who he bumps into on the bus.
WKW Yes, but he’s embarrassed. He’s so good at killing, but he’s kind of lost in that moment. He doesn’t know how to react, because the manager didn’t arrange this meeting. It took him by surprise. And he hates surprise.
HO But in the end, the irony is that he is surprised because his life has ended in an assignment.
WKW Or maybe he’s predicted something like that. If you are a killer, you have to predict that somehow you will end up being killed. It’s an arrangement. The whole thing is about arrangement: A very obedient guy who works according to schedule and doesn’t want surprises.
HO The other thing I responded to was the slapstick humor, the female character going from floor to floor and screaming out, trying to prevent the wedding between her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. Again, it’s both the humor and the coolness that refers back, for me, to Chungking. A new element in Fallen Angels is the introduction of a longing for family. In Chungking, the characters seem so self-contained, so young, so much of the present. They didn’t suggest a past where families were involved. They were loners.
WKW I don’t agree with that.
HO You don’t?
WKW In Days of Being Wild the main character is going back to the Philippines to find his family. And in As Tears Go By, the gangster character goes back to visit his family before he goes to kill somebody.
HO I stand corrected.
WKW But the father figure is new, because in As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild, it’s the mother figure. Takashi’s father in the film, in fact, is the manager of the place where we were shooting, the Chungking Mansion guesthouse. I met him when I made Chungking Express, and he’s a very decent, very quiet man. He took care of us. And I was very curious about this guy, because he could not speak Cantonese, he speaks Taiwanese dialect. I thought, why is he working as a night manager in a guesthouse in Hong Kong? There must be a story behind it.
HO We still haven’t really talked about Happy Together. You won the Best Director award for it at Cannes. That’s a big deal.
WKW No no no. In fact, it makes no difference, it’s just something you can put on an ad.
HO Happy Together moved me very much—God, I hate reading words like that, “moved me very much.” But I’ve heard Christopher Doyle, your collaborator and cinematographer, describe it as your most linear, straightforward work.
WKW Yes, I told him this film should be very straightforward, because after Chungking and Fallen Angels, people expected fragmented films. And there are so many young filmmakers doing things like that now in Asia. We had to move on. There’s no point staying there forever. And also, the topic of this film—in the last three or four years there’ve been some films about gay relationships made in Hong Kong and Asia, and somehow the characters were either treated too delicately, or as a joke. Sometimes it was too aggressive, like a character saying: I’m gay and you’re straight so you don’t like me and I don’t like you. I don’t like this kind of attitude. So I thought if we’re going to make a film about two men, I wanted it to be as straightforward as possible. Just treat it as two people, that’s it.
HO Why Buenos Aires?
WKW I didn’t want to make a film about Hong Kong in 1997. After we made the film, we knew that it was not about Buenos Aires, but was somehow more related to Hong Kong. So instead of calling it “Buenos Aires Affair,” which was its working title and would have been very exotic but misleading, we called it Happy Together. Maybe you think that is kind of cynical. . .
HO No. I didn’t respond to it as cynical at all; to me it was what they could have been but weren’t. By the end, the film achieves a great melancholy power. It’s also about the pop world of love, ships passing in the night, and the wonderfully lush moments, this time transposed to a different country and a homosexual context.
WKW To me, Happy Together applies not only to the relationship between two persons, but also the relationship between one person and his past. If people are at peace with themselves and their past, this is the start of being able to be happy with somebody else.
HO And that somebody else could possibly be Chang, the third character who gets introduced?
WKW Yes.
HO I responded strongly to Chang. When he entered the scene a little after halfway through the movie, the spirits of the film seemed to lift, in the same that Fay Wang was. . .
WKW Fresh air.
HO Yes, it’s a break from the masochistic affair between these two guys. (pause) At what point in your life did you decide you were going to be a director?
WKW The only hobby I had as a child was watching movies. Somehow I think I enjoy being involved in this business. I started as a scriptwriter and one day one of the producers asked me, “Do you want to make a film?” And I became a director.
HO Just like that he asked you? Did he see something in you or was it mere convenience?
WKW There were two reasons: I had been working for him for two years and he knew me well; and it was right after A Better Tomorrow, and the situation in the Hong Kong film industry had become very prosperous. That year we produced two hundred films.
HO What year was that?
WKW 1988. So they needed more directors and more young faces, and I got the chance.
HO Who are the directors that you like?
WKW The list changes from day to day, but I don’t think it’s fair to mention them.
HO You’re not going to mention any names?
WKW No names.
HO Are you sure? We can preface this by saying, this is by no means an exhaustive list; it’s not meant to be definitive; it’s not meant to crowd out anybody who you forget, conveniently or inconveniently, at the present moment. (laughter)
WKW No names.
HO I tried.
Trouvé ici.
Wong Kar-wai As Tears Go By was my first film, and at that time John Woo had just made A Better Tomorrow and everybody in Hong Kong was making gangster films. I thought, “What else can I do?” So I made Days of Being Wild and borrowed its form from MTV.
HO When you say an MTV “form,” do you mean the quick cuts?
WKW Yeah, it’s more fragmented. Most of the filmmaking in Hong Kong, even now, is very lyrical, very smooth, and always very traditional. Of course MTV has become something very formulaic, but in the late eighties, when it was first shown in Hong Kong, we were all really impressed with the energy and the fragmented structure. It seemed like we should go in this direction. About the step-printing process, in effect it’s an answer to John Woo’s use of slow motion. We did it in reverse and shot with a faster speed, which turned out to be something like step-printing.
HO Days of Being Wild has been described as a Chinese Rebel Without a Cause — have you heard this before?
WKW No.
HO It was a shorthand description a critic and friend used. It wasn’t meant to be definitive, but suggestive.
WKW The fact is that when Western films are shown in Hong Kong they have a Chinese title. The Chinese title of Rebel Without a Cause was Days of Being Wild.
HO So it was wrong of him to extrapolate from that that this was a Chinese version of Rebel Without a Cause.
WKW Yes. In fact that’s also the case in Happy Together. When Antonioni’s Blow Up was shown in Hong Kong the Chinese title was not exactly “happy together,” but “the first gleam of the spring light.” (laughter)
HO But when you appropriated the title Days of Being Wild — was there meant to be a slight reference? There are some surface similarities: it’s about good-looking young men…
WKW Rebel Without a Cause in Chinese becomes “our faith,” which is a term that was used very typically in the sixties about kids like James Dean, or kids who imitated James Dean. They came from rich families, had nothing to do, they weren’t happy with their lives and were trying to be different. It was a typical ’60s symptom.
HO So the title was a means of getting at that time period. Another trademark of yours is the slow-mo tracking shot: of the palm trees swaying with that beautiful soundtrack in Days of Being Wild. I remember a guitar strumming as Leslie Cheung was walking into the shop where the soda girl worked. It’s very romantic. It’s lush in the way that perhaps young American filmmakers are afraid to be because it’s part of the legacy of the fifties’ studio films. Young American filmmakers’ response to that is to be hip and cynical. They don’t want to be seen as corny and syrupy. But you, on the other hand, do it, and you keep doing it, and do it with such faith in its power and with such love. In other words, you’re not winking.
WKW I make films mostly by instinct, and I tried to make the stories in Days of Being Wild in different styles: sometimes as in Hollywood B-movies where there’s a long take and it’s very melodramatic; and sometimes I just wanted to make it like a Bergman film with lots of close-ups. I had fun in Days of Being Wild. I really enjoyed it, although it was painful to make because we had so many problems and in the end it wasn’t a big commercial success. The producer didn’t make the sequel because he thought it was too risky. After my first film, As Tears Go By, everybody expected another very commercial film with the six hottest young idols in Hong Kong.
HO Who were also in Days of Being Wild?
WKW Right. And the image of the palm trees, like the waterfall in Happy Together — all these shots remind me of nature. People should be very humble towards the natural world. Fassbinder said, he tries to show change by showing something which never changes. In this case, the waterfall never changes, the people keep changing.
HO So it’s a contrast between the constant changing vicissitudes of life as manifested in the characters, and nature, which simply exists. After Days of Being Wild you were working on Ashes of Time, which actually took two years to complete. It’s been said that during that time you were frustrated and started working on Chungking Express as a way to clear your mind. Paradoxically, Chungking took a very short time between its conception and completion. Was Ashes of Time a project initiated by you or was it something your producers recommended—maybe after the commercial disappointment of Days of Being Wild it was something they felt would be easier for you—to have another commercial hit with a commercial genre.
WKW Of course that was the thinking of the producers. After Days of Being Wild it took me a while to find a producer who was willing to finance my film.
HO How long did that take?
WKW About a year. I had an idea to make a film about two women: the Evil East and the Malicious West. I borrowed these two characters from a novel by Louis Chua, The Eagle Shooting Hero, which is very popular. The producers suggested, “Instead of making a film about the two women, why not make the novel into a film?” I thought it would be fun. I’ve always wanted to make a costume drama.
HO When was this novel written?
WKW Around 1950. It is the most popular book, second only to The Little Red Book by Chairman Mao. Everybody knows about this novel, and when we were students we were crazy about it. But to make it into a film… after rereading it, I didn’t think I liked it that much. The two characters I had originally wanted to develop, the Evil East and the Malicious West, were still the only characters who interested me. And in the novel they are already seventy-something. I thought instead of making a film about these two old women, I’d begin to think of their younger days. So rather than rewriting the novel, I invented prologues to it. It took almost two years to finish this project.
HO For what reasons?
WKW We had ten of the most famous movie stars in Asia, and their schedules were impossible, and we were shooting in Hong Kong and in northern China, which is a desert. I was also the co-producer of the film, which was so painful. I had to think really carefully about every decision I made because it costs a lot of money and time. It’s not fun to make a film like this. After we completed the film and had finished the post-production, it was April already and we knew the film was going to compete in the Venice Film Festival at the end of September. That meant we had four months without anything to do, and I thought, I should have a holiday. So I made a film.
HO Your way of having a holiday is making another film?
WKW Yes, I thought I should do something to make myself feel comfortable about making films again. So I made Chungking Express, which I made like a student film. After Ashes of Time I decided that if I wanted to be a director, I had to know exactly what my space was in the market. If I was going to make big expensive films, that meant I had to face mass audiences. And not all of my material is for mass audiences.
HO That’s a key realization.
WKW You try to cope with the mass audience, but in fact you are not doing something for them—I would be fighting with myself. I thought, I don’t have to make big films, I can make small films that I can be happy with. I can find my own audience. So I made Chungking Express with a very low budget, and we made the film very quickly, only six weeks from the idea to the edit.
HO Was the script written in process, or was it written before the production began?
WKW As a writer, I always have some short stories in my mind which have not yet developed into a script, and I just picked out three and said, “Okay, let’s start shooting.” I wrote in the daytime and we shot at night. We were shooting in chronological order.
HO So you wrote the movie as you went along, you didn’t hodgepodge it, or skip around and decide later in the editing room that this was the order? You already knew?
WKW I didn’t know what would happen tomorrow, but I knew what had happened today. After I finished a day of shooting, then I knew what would happen next. We were going step by step, and because I had so much fun making the first part, I made the film too long. So I skipped the third story.
HO The third story became Fallen Angels. Of all your films my favorite is Chungking Express. What stays in my mind is its romantic quality, the protagonist’s voice-over in the beginning of the film: When he bumps into Brigitte Lin in the marketplace and says, “I was this close to the woman I would fall in love with 24 hours later.” Physical proximity is going to translate into an emotional proximity. The lushness of that romanticism, without being corny, was like a very good pop song.
WKW But for me it is very Chinese. In Chinese there is a term which is very difficult to translate into English, it is something like “chances.” It means: Why am I sitting here having this interview with you instead of somebody else? Why should we meet here? This is about chances, and I think all my films are about chances.
HO What I was referring to was the highly romantic nature—not just that it’s coincidence, meeting and not meeting which is part of living in a large city—but the treatment, which to me was very atypical of most of the Hong Kong movies which treat romance in a giggly way. I cringe watching them. But somehow in your film I felt myself opening up. It wasn’t embarrassing, in fact, far from it, it was a great pop song with a refrain that stayed in your mind.
Whereas Chungking was sunshiny and suffused with bright, lovely daytime colors, Fallen Angels is more about neon, and night time, and grunge. It’s also the difference between the ingenue of Fay Wang and the eyeshadow-wearing German chanteuse aura of Michelle Reis, who plays the booking agent.
WKW You’re right, because to me Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long. I always think these two films should be seen together as a double bill. In fact, people asked me during an interview for Chungking Express: “You’ve made these two stories which have no relationship at all to each other, how can you connect them?” And I said, “The main characters of Chungking Express are not Fay Wang or Takashi Kaneshiro, but the city itself, the night and day of Hong Kong. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels together are the bright and dark of Hong Kong.” I see the films as inter-reversible, the character of Fay Wang could be the character of Takashi in Fallen Angels; Brigitte Lin in Chungking could be Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. All of their characters are inter-reversible. Also, in Chungking we were shooting from a very long distance with long lenses, but the characters seem close to us.
HO Would that account for the freshness and intimacy with which the actors interacted with each other?
WKW Yes. And in Fallen Angels the characters were shot with an extremely wide angle. The camera is very close to the actors, but they seem far away. The purpose of the cameras in both films is that they are just like civilian cameras.
HO Like surveillance.
WKW Yes, they are always there watching people’s behavior. In fact, they are the other main characters in the film. The purpose is the same, but we’re using different approaches: Chungking is so far but so close; Fallen Angels is so close but so far.
HO That’s very enlightening, because for me Chungking seemed much more expansive, more airy. And what I got from it was joy. I felt so transported watching it, even though I had to get used to your sense of timing. These languorous moments fill out the body of the film and are interspersed with sudden ventings or bursts of violence, people chasing each other on the street, and that great montage of Brigitte Lin organizing the dope smuggling with the Indian family. They’re great bursts and then you see these longeurs where nothing much happens and your sense of time gets distended—particularly in the latter half of the film when it’s primarily about Fay Wang developing a huge crush on Tony Leung. It makes sense now that you say you were shooting the actors from far away. There’s a nice feeling of not being intruded upon; but in Fallen Angels I get cramped.
WKW As I said, the main character in these two films is the city, the Midnight Express fast food shop, because if that shop could talk… It’s always there but the people keep changing.
HO I don’t know if I buy that. I say this not out of any disrespect, but it underestimates the vibrancy, the charisma of specific actors. The idea may be the abstract concept of this inanimate object being passed into and out of by different characters, but what you end up responding to are the lives you see embodied by those characters.
WKW Of course, people are more affected by actors or acting. But as a filmmaker, I need some logic. And this was my logic in making these two films, and how I connected these stories and these films together. People say my films don’t have any plot or storyline, but in my logic there is a storyline.
HO The constant being the place, and then the idea of ships passing through the night.
WKW Yes.
HO Let’s talk a bit about Fallen Angels. My response to Fallen Angels, as I said, is set up by the idea of night and day, or light and dark. I lived in Los Angeles for ten years, and I moved to New York three years ago. With that move, my tastes in film and music and everything changed considerably. I would probably love Fallen Angels if I still lived in L.A., but now that I live in New York, where joy is in such short quantity—where you ride the subway and people’s faces are so downcast, living billboards of discontent—it seems that Fallen Angels is a redundant reminder of that. When I was living in L.A., I wanted unhappiness. To balance my diet. That’s why I used to love Fassbinder, he seemed to have a predetermined goal to be unpleasant. Now I respond more to Chungking’s sunshine than I do to the grunge of Fallen Angels.
WKW I asked you before if you like sweet things.
HO I do, I love ice cream. And it’s a recent thing, I never used to have a sweet tooth.
WKW Mmm-hmm.
HO So, that’s my spiel about light and dark.
WKW Yes, the light side and the dark side, this is one of the reasons that I made Fallen Angels. It’s fair to show both sides of a coin.
HO What I responded to in Fallen Angels were the groovy parts: The scenes where Leon Lai plays the hitman and he’s walking to his assignments with the Massive Attack soundtrack.
WKW I wanted to use Massive Attack’s music, but it was too expensive, so I asked my composer in Hong Kong to do something like Massive Attack.
HO Well it’s very successful. It’s an iconic, cool moment. People might criticize it as being synthetic or…
WKW I like the term synthetic. In fact, his part is synthetic. It is my impression of Leon Lai, who is a very professional actor—so professional that he works everything according to the arrangement of his manager. So I thought I should put his character in this form. If he’s going to kill somebody, he must behave like a killer. Everything is image. And his character is incapable of communicating, of contact with real people. Even with his schoolmate…
HO Who he bumps into on the bus.
WKW Yes, but he’s embarrassed. He’s so good at killing, but he’s kind of lost in that moment. He doesn’t know how to react, because the manager didn’t arrange this meeting. It took him by surprise. And he hates surprise.
HO But in the end, the irony is that he is surprised because his life has ended in an assignment.
WKW Or maybe he’s predicted something like that. If you are a killer, you have to predict that somehow you will end up being killed. It’s an arrangement. The whole thing is about arrangement: A very obedient guy who works according to schedule and doesn’t want surprises.
HO The other thing I responded to was the slapstick humor, the female character going from floor to floor and screaming out, trying to prevent the wedding between her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. Again, it’s both the humor and the coolness that refers back, for me, to Chungking. A new element in Fallen Angels is the introduction of a longing for family. In Chungking, the characters seem so self-contained, so young, so much of the present. They didn’t suggest a past where families were involved. They were loners.
WKW I don’t agree with that.
HO You don’t?
WKW In Days of Being Wild the main character is going back to the Philippines to find his family. And in As Tears Go By, the gangster character goes back to visit his family before he goes to kill somebody.
HO I stand corrected.
WKW But the father figure is new, because in As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild, it’s the mother figure. Takashi’s father in the film, in fact, is the manager of the place where we were shooting, the Chungking Mansion guesthouse. I met him when I made Chungking Express, and he’s a very decent, very quiet man. He took care of us. And I was very curious about this guy, because he could not speak Cantonese, he speaks Taiwanese dialect. I thought, why is he working as a night manager in a guesthouse in Hong Kong? There must be a story behind it.
HO We still haven’t really talked about Happy Together. You won the Best Director award for it at Cannes. That’s a big deal.
WKW No no no. In fact, it makes no difference, it’s just something you can put on an ad.
HO Happy Together moved me very much—God, I hate reading words like that, “moved me very much.” But I’ve heard Christopher Doyle, your collaborator and cinematographer, describe it as your most linear, straightforward work.
WKW Yes, I told him this film should be very straightforward, because after Chungking and Fallen Angels, people expected fragmented films. And there are so many young filmmakers doing things like that now in Asia. We had to move on. There’s no point staying there forever. And also, the topic of this film—in the last three or four years there’ve been some films about gay relationships made in Hong Kong and Asia, and somehow the characters were either treated too delicately, or as a joke. Sometimes it was too aggressive, like a character saying: I’m gay and you’re straight so you don’t like me and I don’t like you. I don’t like this kind of attitude. So I thought if we’re going to make a film about two men, I wanted it to be as straightforward as possible. Just treat it as two people, that’s it.
HO Why Buenos Aires?
WKW I didn’t want to make a film about Hong Kong in 1997. After we made the film, we knew that it was not about Buenos Aires, but was somehow more related to Hong Kong. So instead of calling it “Buenos Aires Affair,” which was its working title and would have been very exotic but misleading, we called it Happy Together. Maybe you think that is kind of cynical. . .
HO No. I didn’t respond to it as cynical at all; to me it was what they could have been but weren’t. By the end, the film achieves a great melancholy power. It’s also about the pop world of love, ships passing in the night, and the wonderfully lush moments, this time transposed to a different country and a homosexual context.
WKW To me, Happy Together applies not only to the relationship between two persons, but also the relationship between one person and his past. If people are at peace with themselves and their past, this is the start of being able to be happy with somebody else.
HO And that somebody else could possibly be Chang, the third character who gets introduced?
WKW Yes.
HO I responded strongly to Chang. When he entered the scene a little after halfway through the movie, the spirits of the film seemed to lift, in the same that Fay Wang was. . .
WKW Fresh air.
HO Yes, it’s a break from the masochistic affair between these two guys. (pause) At what point in your life did you decide you were going to be a director?
WKW The only hobby I had as a child was watching movies. Somehow I think I enjoy being involved in this business. I started as a scriptwriter and one day one of the producers asked me, “Do you want to make a film?” And I became a director.
HO Just like that he asked you? Did he see something in you or was it mere convenience?
WKW There were two reasons: I had been working for him for two years and he knew me well; and it was right after A Better Tomorrow, and the situation in the Hong Kong film industry had become very prosperous. That year we produced two hundred films.
HO What year was that?
WKW 1988. So they needed more directors and more young faces, and I got the chance.
HO Who are the directors that you like?
WKW The list changes from day to day, but I don’t think it’s fair to mention them.
HO You’re not going to mention any names?
WKW No names.
HO Are you sure? We can preface this by saying, this is by no means an exhaustive list; it’s not meant to be definitive; it’s not meant to crowd out anybody who you forget, conveniently or inconveniently, at the present moment. (laughter)
WKW No names.
HO I tried.
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